


Throw Thy Cloak Aside to Feed Me

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Jaegers are wolves, M/M, No sparks, Pack Bonding, Psychic Bond, Psychic Wolves, Wolves Made Them Do It, so is bangladesh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2018-09-23 18:57:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9671726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: Sequel toI've Come to Claim a Heart From Thee.--Gilgamesh Wulfenbach is a boringly normal petty baron's son, having a totally normal (boring) time at university in Paris with his wolfsister Bangladesh (not normal in the least.) (The wolf herself, not the fact that he has one at all. His father is one of the premier breeders in Europa, after all.)Then he goes and falls for a duchess regnant (above his station) (kind of) (it's complicated.) with herownwolfsister (not even on the same continent as normal but amazing either way.)She's so great he almost doesn't resent Prince Weasel for falling for her too. (Just kidding, he totally does.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [I’ve Come to Claim a Heart From Thee](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5993550) by [Asuka Kureru (Askerian)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru). 



> (whoops posting it a day early. oh well, i won't be around tomorrow anyway.) 
> 
> This is an alternate universe inspired by A Companion to Wolves by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, written for the Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia challenge.
> 
> (The original book is pretty much a Pern Vikings AU with wolves instead of dragons. This 'verse, meanwhile, is Girl Genius minus sparks plus telepathic wolves.)
> 
> \--
> 
> I've been working on this since last year but my writing output has gone WAY down in he last couple of years so it's maybe one third complete atm. :( on the upside I'm working on it pretty steadily...? 
> 
> by the way, there is absolutely going to be porn in that story, but like. probably not for another 50K at this rate. >_>;;;

_A deer mincing through dewy grass_ flashed in Gil's mind, only the deer had acquired a ridiculous wolf's head; its black nose tilted up to disdainfully sniff at the sky.

Gil shook himself out of his reverie, looked down at Bangladesh. The she-wolf was ambling her looping, aimless way across the university's courtyard, black tail bobbing, long white legs moving with deceptive laziness. She didn't stop pretending to ramble either, even though he could feel her attention tightening onto a single point, a single --

Gil's hand shot forward to catch her tail as it whipped past. He felt the fur slide through his hand, closed it too late to have anything but shed undercoat and a few pulled-fresh hairs to show for it. Behind them on the brick path to the theology pavillon there was another wolf, already whirling around to meet Bang head on.

Much smaller -- prettier, fancier (a Valois show-line?) -- it was going to get _savaged_ , and he tried to turn his spasm of fear into anger for the strength to force Bangladesh to back off --

The silvery siamese dodged by a hair's breadth and snapped its teeth closed on the side of Bang's neck. The copper links of her collar clanged. The two wolves sprang apart, circled, heads low, neither one backing off. Gil made himself slow to a businesslike jog, searching through the gathering crowd of staring students for the other wolfbrother -- this was not a shy wolf, very much not the most common temperament of non-confrontational unless in battle or cornered; Bang was singing her mayhem song all through the pack sense and Gil could feel zero hints of _want to run but must protect brother_. No, it was all _challenge? Alright_. _I'll win._ They were going to have very little chance of stopping this if he and the other wolfbrother didn't work in tandem...

His eyes caught once, and then twice, on a young woman in a demure hunter-green dress holding a satchel full of note paper -- rare because this _was_ the Ecole Polytechnique and a lady would have to be be exceptionally gifted to be received at all, which was odd, which was _interesting_ , but not what --

Rare, also, because there was no trepidation in her smile, no fear, no shocked excitement, only patience and rueful amusement.

"Yours?" Gil asked -- a deduction so fast it bordered on instinct -- as the she-wolves went through another pass, snapping at each other's muzzle and failing to catch a grip.

"Mine," she said with a resigned-but-not sigh, and offered her gloved hand for a rough, frank shake. "Agatha Jenkassister."

"Gil Bangladeshbrother," Gil returned, omitting (gladly) his last name since she had done away with hers. Her grip was solid through the glove; he couldn't help but grin, thinking of his twin sister, and shake back with equal vigor. "So how are we...?"

The lady grinned, green eyes crinkling up with a touch of mischief. "Oh, easy. Jenka!" she called over the ghoulish, appalled murmurs of the gathering crowd -- mostly sheltered bourgeois sons and not a lot from the nobility which would have given them routine access to a wolf litter, or even a passing familiarity. "We'll be late for class!"

The silver-and-soot bitch wolf turned on her back feet like a parade horse and trotted calmly away from Bangladesh, who froze crouched low in the second before a strike and staring dumbly at her departing hindquarters.

 _But fighting!_ she protested through the wider pack bond. _Fight! Blood! Fun! Die!!_

 _Learning-leader is waiting and must not growl at (cake and coffee and engine grease)_ , the other wolf returned with total, pleasantly distracted unconcern. _Kill you later_ , she promised as Miss Agatha crouched to touch her wolf sister's dark muzzle with gloved fingers, murmuring about the few spots of blood on dark fur.

For a second Gil almost relaxed, almost thought it was going to end there, and then Bangladesh let out a light, rolling growl, almost like a purr or like amusement except that Gil knew her and she was _furious_ underneath.

She really enjoyed being furious.

"Bang, _no!_ " he snapped, even as she shifted her weight to pounce. 

_A piebald wolf jumping at human-and-wolf_ flashed between their minds -- not from Jenka, but from her human sister. And then, slammed on its heels with the sharp determination of a blood vow, was _human takes a knife from her belt and shoves it up the soft underside of your jaw_.

Bangladesh stopped in her tracks.

 _Aw, unfair_ , she whined, huffing through her nose.

 _You will fight with Jenka later, or not at all._ Straightening up, Agatha nodded at Gil, hands gathered over her satchel. "Good day."

"Good day," Gil echoed back dumbly, and then he was left with the crowd and the amused-murderous bitch wolf that they all loved to whisper about, that he couldn't control, and if Voltaire heard about yet another incident Gil would be out of the Ecole Polytechnique on his ear.

Because the wolf whose name was the scent of hot, dripping blood and spilled entrails had decided that she was bored of the countryside and her favorite human's lands and pack, and might as well follow Gil to Paris, and it was either pretend to the officials that the wolf his own father had jilted was his own or have her shot down in the street for being a feral. And then no doubt they'd figure out she came at least halfway from Wulfenbach stocks, to add some social ruin to her death.

 _Whew, annoyed_ , Bangladesh thought at him, something like the impression of a whistle, irreverend and not concerned. Gil clenched his hands and teeth on a sudden urge to snarl; she twitched anyway, feeling the full force of it.

"That's enough," he said between his teeth. "Come to heel." Bangladesh flicked an ear backward doubtfully, like him treating her like a disobedient dog was uncalled for after this debacle, and Gil _bristled_ in the pack sense. _Come to heel **now** or I am sending you back to Father in a box_.

She came, sighing like he was being unreasonable and should be humored, took her place at his left leg, and followed him to class, even, instead of slipping out to wander the school grounds, a model of good behavior. It was faked, of course, but Gil already knew he was going to forgive it, like he had forgiven the rest, and was angry at himself almost more than at her. 

In between two instances of _I could/ought/wish I would **kick** you right now_ he turned over in his mind the odd, powerful smell of strawberry cake and dark coffee and engine grease that was Miss Agatha's wolf-name all through his morning classes. 

\--

_Little brother, salutations! Higgs also sends his greetings and a face lick. We have just arrived at this hilariously named new town of Tombstone, Arizona..._

It wasn't that Gil didn't love to receive letters from his twin, infrequent and delayed as they were. They had grown together on their father's lands and gotten along famously until she decided three years ago that Europe was being stupidly stuffy and left for their mother's lands, and then later for a long trip across the rest of America.

The thing that hurt most unexpectedly wasn't that she was having adventures, while he was tethered to the Great Teutonic Empire and the barony he was set to inherit. It _was_ something he envied her for, but he could deal with that. There was no way Zeetha would have chosen to pursue higher education in Paris, so he would have been without her either way.

The unexpected hurt was that Higgs had chosen to leave with her.

Sigh. Life was really unfair sometimes. He closed his mailbox, still staring down at the paper without reading, stepped through the door that Bangladesh was politely keeping open with her shoulder for him, and was foolishly unprepared when she snatched the paper with her teeth and yanked it clean out of his hand.

"Bang, no--"

 _Whine, whine_ , she mocked, dancing out into the street, under a horse's hooves and out the other side; Gil had to come to a dead stop as the coach driver hurled insults at him.

"Bangladesh," he shouted as he threw himself through morning traffic after her, "give me back that letter, you're drooling all over the ink!"

_Leeeet me think about **no!**_

"Argh!"

He put on a burst of speed, but then so did she, and he lost sight of her past the next corner.

Then there was a loud yip and a series of dull thuds like a cartful of potatoes tumbling to the ground. Gil grabbed for the stone corner as he rushed past to keep from tripping himself into the street.

Bangladesh and a stocky blond wolf were rolling on the ground trying to stand back up and getting in each other's way, right on top of a just-as-blond young man. Agatha and Jenka stood in the nearest doorway, watching, an impression of eyebrows arched echoing from both of them.

Sighing, Gil shoved at Bang's hindquarters with his foot and caught the man under his armpits to haul him back to his feet. The blond wolf followed in a sudden wriggle-and-hop that raked his oversized dewclaw noisily on the paved stones, and went to nose at the man Gil was still holding up.

His hand falling automatically to pat the inquisitive muzzle, the man blinked up at Gil. (Gil's age, he thought, or thereabout, and so very familiar with wolves.)

"Ah, thank you--"

Gil let go and stepped back. "Um, it's quite alright, I'm afraid my sister-wolf was the cause of this -- _Bang_ , the _letter_ \--"

He went to fish it out of the gutter, swallowing swears. At least the only wetness on it seemed to be dusty _water_ , not anything worse like the contents of a chamberpot, but -- ugh.

"Good morning, Gil," Agatha said like she was trying not to smile. Sighing, Gil gave up and crooked her a smile. 

"Good morning, Agatha. Or as good as it gets," he added, throwing Bang a pointed look. (She huffed, sat, and started licking under her hind leg.)

The blond dog-wolf went to sniff at him in turn; Bangladesh growled almost as an afterthought. 

Gil offered his hand palm out. Clearly a Heterodyne line, that one, though the single dewclaw seemed to be due more to an accident than to the asymmetry that so often showed up over there, as the other dewclaw was missing entirely and there was a patch of shiny, fur-less scar tissue where it should have been. One of his ears still had a puppy-fold to it.

The scent of _sheep and churned earth_ was pushed at him, alongside a fleeting image of a whole herd running away in all directions in panic. Chuckling, Gil returned his own _thunder and burnt feathers_ , Bangladesh's hot steaming blood and entrails, looked up at the man. _What about your brother?_

"--Right, I'm very slow in the morning, I'm sorry," Agatha interrupted. "This is Vanamonde von Mekkhan -- um, an old family friend. He's in political sciences with me. And this is Ognian. Van, Oggie, Gil Bangladeshbrother, and Bangladesh. They're in engineering with me, I've told you about them."

Face heating up a tiny little bit at her words and then worse at Vanamonde's sudden smile, Gil offered a hand to shake. "Good things, I hope." God, did he hope. He looked the man over, trying not to overthink the easy familiarity with which Agatha was batting his sleeve free of dust. "You aren't hurt from your fall?"

"Oh, if I got hurt every time I got trampled by packs of rampaging wolves I'd never get to do anything with my day," Vanamonde replied philosophically. Agatha chuckled like this was an old private joke, and let the door of her building close behind her.

"I do hope you won't find anymore packs to throw yourself under this morning. Oggie, make sure he remains un-stepped on, will you?"

Ognian sat up smartly at Vanamonde's right and wagged his bushy tail with enthusiasm, gave a single doggish bark.

"Good boy. I'll see you this afternoon for Poli-sci, Van, good luck with your errands."

"Thank you, my lady," Vanamonde replied with an urbane bow and a smile, and Gil was still trying to decode the interaction (friends? what _kind_ of friends? How much was he teasing when he called Agatha 'my lady' so decorously? Was he laughing at Agatha or at Gil or -- encouragingly -- at them _both_?) when he and his wolf left, tail and hand waving together. 

"Well, and that leaves us. Are you coming?"

Blinking, Gil grinned at her by reflex, straightened the letter a last time and stuck it in his bag blindly. They fell into step, the two bitch wolves side-eyeing each other as they speed-walked ahead trying to take the lead without showing their hindquarters.

"You could probably save your letter if you stick it between blotter paper sheets, but I don't have any on me."

"Yes, me neither. I'll have to cadge some from a classmate and it might be too late by then. But I may still be able to read the scratches in the paper, my sister tends to press her pens down pretty hard!"

Agatha chuckled. "You might need a magnifying glass, the fibers will be quite swollen. Let me -- aha, here's mine."

Gil's cheeks were starting to ache a little bit from smiling. He took the glass from her hand, slipped it delicately in his watch pocket, and a handkerchief in between so he wouldn't scratch it. "Thank you. I'll be sure to keep you informed on the result of this experiment."

"Please do," Agatha replied drolly, watching him like she thought he was the silliest thing, but a silly thing she was at least mildly fond of. Her eyes were so intensely green --

A scent name was thrown out from Jenka, something animal -- and the clean, nose-prickling feeling of breathing outside air after it had snowed. Agatha blinked, straightened up. "Oh!"

"Someone you know?" Gil asked, thrown, as Agatha sped up to something that wasn't a jog only because her feet were never technically off the ground at the same time, low heels clacking fast through the last crossroad and over the campus' threshold.

"A good friend!" she threw over her shoulder, leaving him behind, and then--

"Your Grace!" a traitorous redheaded fop called out, a wide, unfeigned smile on his face.

"Oh, please, your Highness," Agatha retorted, and Gil could see nothing but her swinging golden hair and the back of her dress and still knew she was rolling her eyes. But smiling, too. "My uncle isn't out of the running yet. We've pretty much just passed the title on as a formality, and then he shoved me out of town and told me to finish my education already, so it's not like it counts very much!"

"My lady, then," Tarvek (Tarvek!) replied at her hint of discomfort, smile softening into something that looked fond, that looked _honest_. "Hello, Agatha."

 _Bite him_ , Bangladesh growled from her spot against Gil's thigh, and he didn't know if she meant Gil or her but he could feel the echo of flesh parting under teeth, the clasp of their jaws, the snarling shake--

 _No_ , he said, forcing himself to breathe it out, to wait for his chest to unsqueeze. 

Bang didn't _hate_ Tarvek. That one was on him.

"Hey," he pushed out, walking up to them with his hands in pockets like a street urchin. Tarvek's face tightened for a brief flash, and then turned into polite blankness. "You're late. Didn't think you were coming back this year after all."

"... Your Highness," he said to Gil, every word measured for maximum amount of undertone. 

"Oh, come off it," Gil couldn't help but retort, irritated. "Your _Majesty_."

Tarvek sniffed. "Please. It isn't like _I_ misranked you."

"You know each other?" Agatha asked, looking from one to the other, blond brow furrowed just a little. "I didn't know you were titled, Gil. Especially not..."

'Your Highness' was for princes. Which were rather thin on the ground. And of course Gil had figured out what Agatha was two days in -- how could anyone miss the rumors that they had Her Grace the Duchess of Mechanicsburg in attendance past the first day of her admission or not realize the rumors applied to her when she was a _blonde woman with a wolf_ at an overwhelmingly masculine, majorly bourgeois school, he didn't know -- but. Yeah. She should have heard what he was, too, only there was a damn good reason she hadn't.

"I'm a _baron's heir_ ," he said, trying to unclench his jaw. "You two have met, then. Some fancy party, I guess?"

"Oh, the _fanciest_ ," Tarvek said airily, gloved fingers flicking through the air as he sidestepped Bangladesh's creeping, fangy muzzle. "Last year's Spring Ball at home, with all the crème de la crème. Lady Agatha was wearing the most _elegant_ ensembles."

"I have never worn an elegant _anything_ ," Agatha said with a loud snort before Gil could grind his teeth down into nubs. "Not that I wouldn't like to at some point but Mechanicsburg is pretty poor in court-worthy tailors."

Tarvek beamed. Once again it looked sincere. "Oh, well then! You're in Paris, I'd be delighted to direct you to some."

Bangladesh gave Tarvek's hip a good nip, checked at the last moment from anything deeper by Gil's _no!_. He grabbed for her copper collar, hauled her back bodily, ashamed that she was once again harassing people and he couldn't assert enough authority to stop her with a word, that Agatha was watching his failure.

Tarvek was staring at him, nostrils flaring, a hand pressed theatrically on his hip. "I see she hasn't changed."

"Oh, stop that, it was a greeting nip. You know she could do worse."

"Indeed, I know," Tarvek said darkly. Gil scoffed.

"Anyway, we'll be late for Engineering, Agatha. You know Professor Lavellier has it out for us already--"

"Oh, and what on Earth could _you_ have done already," Tarvek sneered, neglecting to be shaken off as they started walking toward the appropriate building.

"Defended me, pretty much," Agatha said, throwing Tarvek a warning side-look that Gil was glad to see. "Not that I needed it but he's one of those people who camouflage their contempt for women under misunderstood facts of biology such as brain _weight_ \--"

"Oh, didn't that get disproved last year?" Tarvek exclaimed. "Canis dirus familiaris brains are not noticeably larger than Canis lupus of the same body size and yet they're several orders of magnitude smarter, so obviously size alone--"

"How do you even _know_ that," Gil blurted out, "since when do you _care_ , you hate wolves!"

"I can educate myself about a _great variety of topics_ , thank you very much!"

" _But at least_ ," Agatha finished, raising her voice, "he's very competent in his own domain. Do you two want me to leave you to talk out your problem?"

"No!" Gil snapped, at the same time as Tarvek's "There is _no_ problem." They glared at each other across her; Bangladesh growled her rolling, laughing growl.

"Right," Agatha replied slowly, disbelief dripping from every syllable and eyebrows furrowed. "No problem. Well, let's hope there won't be a problem at lunch either, Tarvek. This is our classroom. Um, can you find your own...?"

She'd stopped in the doorway to ask, Jenka's muzzle up to nose at Tarvek's elbow. Scowling, Gil tried not to stomp his way to what in the last three weeks had already become their usual desk.

"It's no problem," he could hear Tarvek saying with that disgustingly soft-edged, smarmy voice. Bangladesh's ears were turned their way, to make sure Gil didn't evade a single word. "I only took a few months' break, I doubt they changed the buildings around very much. May I presume to see you at lunch?"

"I already asked you," Agatha reminded him, in the exact same 'you're silly but I might find that amusing and maybe even a little cute' voice she had used on Gil earlier.

Gil made sure he was taking out his papers and pen with great, noisy prejudice. He still heard them exchange goodbyes.

At least he had classes with her all morning, and Tarvek didn't. So there. 

\--

Agatha was going to have Political Sciences with Tarvek all afternoon. The only thing that made Gil feel better was that Vanamonde would be there too.

The commissary was a noisy affair, though the corner of it that wolfed people usually took over had at least less people pressing themselves together. Which meant, of course, that Tarvek had seized a table at the very edge of the two zones.

Usually Gil liked the elbow-to-elbow camaraderie of tighter seats, but Tarvek choosing it had to be some kind of dig at him somehow. 

Neither of them could have presumed to sit on the same bench as Agatha, so they were now next to each other, and Gil was making damn sure not to touch. Not that Tarvek made it a risk either. Urgh.

 _I can touch him for you,_ Bang sang enticingly from under the table. Gil sighed through his nose and bumped her barrel with his toes. 

_Stop being a jerk_. 

_Hm. Nah._

"--And of course after taking so _long_ to be convinced to allow her to go, Father couldn't accept that she might be in town unchaperoned for a couple of weeks," Tarvek was telling Agatha, like they'd been friends for ages and she knew everything about his family affairs save for the very latest developments. Gil made sure to cut his steak extra-fine. "And me being at school during the day, well obviously no one else could possibly _protect_ her--" 

"Hah! Your sister is pretty terrifying, I shudder to think of the fool who'd take liberties," Agatha said, grinning. 

"In _deed_. So the compromise we came to was that we would wait for _her_ term to start and come up to Paris together. What he expects me to do in the evenings I have not the faintest idea. I can hardly attend all the same events she will or follow her to other ladies' tea rooms."

"No offense meant, but your father is kind of..."

"Yes, he does have a very, ah. _Strong_ idea of what reality should be."

Agatha nodded sympathetically. Gil chewed his meat. _Why does she know these things about Tarvek's family_ was a pertinent question, considering how rabidly they all played their perfect nobleman's theater, but the more pressing one by far was _why is Tarvek **telling** her_. God, he hated--

Bangladesh caught Tarvek's booted ankle in her maw and yanked him halfway under the table. Gil plunged under the tablecloth, the bench rocking under both of them. "Bang, _no!_ "

"Jenka," Agatha said tiredly over them, and Jenka burst out of Agatha's skirts to snap her fangs at Bang's ears. Laughing, Bang let go, Tarvek's body draped awkwardly across the bench as his heels skidded on the tiled floor trying to find purchase. Gil rammed his foot underneath Tarvek's to allow him to push up, and grunted at what was going to be a nice bruise as Tarvek ground his foot (probably accidentally) in.

They both emerged from under the table to titters and a great many craned necks. Red-faced, Gil dove back into his plate without a word as Tarvek straightened his cravat and dusted off his sleeve.

Some teasing from nearby tables ensued. Gil threw some weak smiles and tried not to listen to Tarvek and Agatha's good-humored return volleys.

The issue was that when it died down a couple of first year students thought they now had enough of a rapport built to stop by their table on their way out. They wanted to know about Tarvek -- his name, lineage, peerage (measuring their respective ancestries like people in bars measured physical attributes), his relation to Her Grace the Heterodyne --

"By the way, my lady, is it true that this morning you came in with--"

Tarvek and the student's own companion stared the man silent, but the damage was done. Gil stared as well, straightening his back, heard Bangladesh roll out a long, pleased growl from under the next table over, right behind the two louts and in perfect pouncing position.

"There isn't exactly an abundance of apartments for rent in the area," Agatha said dryly. "We walk the same road." 

"Plus they were hardly unchaperoned," Tarvek added with an urbane laugh, but his eyes were cold. Jenka had come out from under the table to stare unblinkingly, the pale eyes in her dark mask making it even more unnerving.

"Yes, but -- wolves are hardly appropriate chaperones in _those_ cases, are they?" the man said with a nervous, trying-for-jovial laugh. "What with the. You know."

Gil's hands closed on the edge of the table and he started to pull himself up -- and then Tarvek's heel found his bruised foot again and pressed down, pinning him.

And then he chuckled, like the joke had been merely a little daring, and not slanderous and perverted. "My good man, they're both lady wolves, I don't see how they'd encourage anyone to imitate their more... sin-free behaviors. Unless you're suggesting... ah... What _is_ it that you're suggesting, exactly?" Pleasant, edging into confused. 

_Invert wolves exist without any human influence though_ , Agatha thought -- almost like an afterthought, a random fact she'd heard, not something she'd meant to share. Gil flushed violently.

" _That is_ \--" he choked out. Both men paled -- and then Gil remembered that as minor nobility he was of course carrying a belt knife, and that his hand was on it.

And that he would be perfectly in his right to challenge them to a duel over Agatha's honor right now, if he felt like it. Dueling being outlawed in the books had never meant any man with a wolf at his side would be convicted of illegal conduct over it, out in the real world.

God, Tarvek had almost managed to embarrass them into going away, and now Gil was making it a spectacle instead. And they were nobles too -- another baron's son (third, not the heir), and some British earl's (favored) relation, and he had to think of all the political mess because his father would _never_ let him forget it--

"I think I will accept your apologies and wish the two of you a good day," Agatha said, and speared a bit of meat with her fork and ate it casually, though her frown betrayed her annoyance. 

The two idiots almost fell over themselves apologizing and then left at a fast walk. Gil didn't even try to talk Bangladesh out of stalking them to the door, ghosting from table to bench and always managing to only be seen on the first glance and never on the second.

What surprised him a bit more was that Jenka followed them, too.

" _Well_ ," Tarvek said, still frowning. "That was subtle and graceful of them, I'm impressed! I suppose you get a lot of talk on this topic," he added more gently.

"I'm a woman with a bitch wolf," Agatha said calmly -- steely calm more than everything-is-pleasant -- as she went through her carrots. "In a place where most people have never been around a wolf and know nothing but rumors and theater plays."

"Too bad you don't have a dog wolf," Tarvek said, but almost like that was a joke.

"Oh yes, great. I'd _love_ to see the kind of talk she'd get for _that_ ," Gil replied, one eyebrow up.

Agatha blinked her green eyes at him, and a lock of hair fell across her forehead. For a few seconds she looked confused, and Gil's face heated up again thinking he was going to have to explain it. 

Then her own face turned red even harder and faster than his had, which was almost worse, because he knew she had tried to visualize it. What it would _mean_ , for a heat.

"God, I'm so sorry," Gil choked out and stood, abandoning his lunch, because he physically couldn't sit here and imagine Agatha on top of a man, some kind of -- of _apparatus_ strapped to her so she could -- could -- could _perform the dog's function_. 

Or trying to approximate manually. 

"I've got to. Do that thing. The letter thing. I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Yes, alright," Agatha forced out, just as strangled. "Good luck with. Um. The letter thing." 

Gil made damn sure he was looking at neither her nor Tarvek as he made his escape.

\--

The next day Gil made sure to leave home fifteen minutes early and to take another, slightly longer route -- and still ran into Agatha Jenkassister and her sister wolf, who had apparently had the same idea.

They stood like idiots on the pavement staring at each other for two seconds, and then Bang jumped forward with eager ears and a wagging tail, and tried to bite off Jenka's black muzzle.

A fight ensued that spilled over into the street, scared a mule, and had a maid throw a whole pot of water at the lot of them, after which they were told to 'take their infernal beasts back to hell with them before she called the constabulary to pick up their mangy corpses, because she had a rifle, yes she did, from her grandpa who went to war with the Prussians, and she would dang well use it too.' 

Bangladesh went to hike up her leg against the woman's door before she followed the rest of them, and when Gil looked back at a half-soaked Agatha in consternation she burst out laughing.

"Oh good lord, that was ridiculous. Well-deserved then."

"I think you still have time to go back and change," Gil ventured, eyeing her wet skirts.

"Yes, I had better. Come on, you monsters, and you had better _play nice_."

The two she-wolves fell into step like they had _practiced_ it, perfectly well-behaved on both sides of her, and Gil was left to jog after the three of them. 

He thought about mentioning that if he came along then they would arrive at school together once again, and surely the rumors -- but then Agatha glanced back at him, wryly amused, eyes glinting behind her spectacles, and he just...

 _Like they don't talk just from us sitting together_ floatedthroughhim, wound through with brief annoyance and a determined mental shrug of her shoulders. They would talk about her all her life for the wolves and the Heterodyne blood and for reigning in her own name and for _going to university_ , and there was nothing for it but to charge through.

Ah. Silly of him. Giving a chagrined, relieved laugh, he sped up until he was once again walking at her side.

Getting out of her wet dress and into something else took both a shorter time than Gil had assumed and still much too much time, and Gil was resigned to the rumors that would come of them coming together, late, and _out of breath_ , when a fancy carriage pulled by two actual white horses slowed from a fast trot to a stomping, frustrated walk beside them.

"Get _in!_ " Tarvek called, throwing the door open. Gil spluttered.

"I should have known you'd have a carriage--"

"I wasn't going to _walk_. Agatha?"

She was already gathering her skirts and climbing in, taking Tarvek's offered hand. Gil hurried to follow, not entirely sure Tarvek wouldn't close the door under his nose and speed off without him.

"It's only five minutes on foot--"

"And one minute on wheels," Tarvek shot back, and then Gil fell on their laps, dropped by a furry missile forcing her way between his knees and another attempting to displace the problem via ramming him in the back.

"You two are supposed to follow outside!" Tarvek protested, squashed under a wriggling wolf as Jenka tried to find footing that wasn't someone's lap or spine. The carriage hadn't been planned with five people in mind, especially not when two of them were long and heavy like wild hogs.

"No time, they're in now," Agatha wheezed, sitting propped up at a sideway angle against the other side and squashed by Bang's front paws in her lap. She tapped her knuckles to the wall behind her and the carriage sped up again, the horses snorting and jerking unhappily from the wolf scent. Gil concentrated on finding floor to push off of as Tarvek leaned over him to close the swinging door.

By the time they got to the university they had barely managed to sit up straight, and they were laughing like idiots, buried from the thighs down under an overflow of bitch wolves.

(Gil was strangely bereft when they climbed out and Bang nipped at Tarvek's thigh and the laughter stopped.)

\--

_To my favorite (Only) sister, greetings from Paris!_

_The third month of my Second year of University looks to be just like the first year, only completely different._

_By which I mean the classes are the same and you would shamelessly Yawn to hear of them, but the company has changed quite a bit. I have told you in my previous Missive about the remarkable new Acquaintances I've had the pleasure to make in the person of Her Grace Agatha Jenkassistser Heterodyne and her Sister Jenka of Mechanicsburg Pack, though I do not know yet if you received it or if it was Lost at Sea or taking its time following you amongst the locals. Things have not Changed on that front and she continues to be Remarkable in a way I believe you would quite Approve of._

_I believe even Mother would approve of her, which says everything._

_The only irritant is the presence of that snake-tongued Fop. You know Which. He returned after all and it turns out he and Agatha are Friendly Acquaintances in their own right, and for some reason she seems to also Enjoy his Company. We have Learned to tolerate each other somewhat, though the snipes are frequent._

_It is not entirely Boring, I will say this much._

There was no way Gil wasn't going to revise this letter heavily before sending it. He might be hopeless when it came to ladies, but he didn't need his sister to point it out when he could see it clearly even before he went about putting words to the page.

Their routine was well established by now. Gil would run into a yawning yet eager Agatha (and Vanamonde on Tuesdays), they would proceed to walk down two streets while discussing classes or some kind of wolf silliness, find Tarvek waiting -- on foot if it was a nice day, in his carriage if it even looked like it might possibly rain on his immaculate coat and boots -- and arrive at university all together, bickering.

During break times and after hours they all socialized elsewhere, but for lunch they would invariably converge again, with Vanamonde and his Oggie for infrequent satellites.

Gil felt... a little weird about it. He certainly hadn't missed Tarvek when Tarvek disappeared from Advanced Mathematics in the middle of May last year -- they'd just spent their shared classes before that ignoring each other frostily in between two of Bangladesh's sneak attacks and Tarvek's showy hysterics and cold-blooded retaliation.

He missed having time alone with Agatha now, he missed the bubbly certainty that they were building something -- new, fragile, but special, an understanding; something that she was seeking with no one else. But the quicksilver brilliance of her mind -- her sometimes blunt but never mean frankness, and the things that would suddenly embarrass her -- he was constantly delighted. 

Sometimes in Engineering together, approaching a problem, the pack mind would click between them and they would forsake the spoken word and start to echo concepts and ideas -- minds taking and using what the other one knew to further their own ideas, what they got from the lesson and from the world, and building _up_ , a back-and-forth volley too fast for words -- pure _understanding_.

He had built a little chariot with sails once as a child, out of a wooden box, a bedsheet and some wheels, and taken it to one of the longest grassy slopes of their mountainous keep, Higgs trying to herd him away while Zeetha heckled and dared him like he needed dared, like she thought he was going to chicken out -- he hadn't been afraid at all. And he had pushed off and half the pack had taken off with him -- and he had left them behind in the wind, outsped the _wolves_ , rushing faster and faster as the valley opened up in all her glory before him, every single blade of grass crisp and intensely green and the waiting sky an immense, depthless blue. He'd broken his collarbone, his arm, and two ribs when he inevitably went over a rock, and hadn't regretted it.

The exhilaration he felt when Agatha's mind joined with his reminded him of that.

 _Breeding seeeeason_ , Bangladesh mind-whispered to him, tongue lolling out to a ridiculous length.

"You shut up!" Gil hissed back, and held onto the satchel that contained his incriminating letter in progress tighter in a sudden burst of fear that it was going to fall and someone was going to pick it up and then his life would be ruined somehow.

Bang danced ahead on tiptoes, tail up and wagging. _Breeeeeding season_ , she threw again, along with an image of Gil-pup bringing Agatha a maimed deer and play-bowing stupidly low.

"Why are you all red?" Agatha asked, brows quirked quizzically, tilting her head at him. Gil gave a nervous laugh.

"No reason. Bang's being annoying. Um." Right. The reason why that letter was in his satchel in the first place. "I got an invitation to Duke Strinbek's Autumn ball in the mail yesterday," and then stuffed the whole pile of correspondence in his satchel when he was almost late to go, great going. "Did you..."

"Oh! Yes, I got it too." She shrugged, like a friend, not like a noble lady. Gil thought about how easy it was to just be around her, and how hard it became when he thought about how much more he wanted. "Not a _bad_ thing, I guess," she added, unconvinced, lip twisting just a bit, "I should go to _some_ of these things while I'm here..."

"Haha, yes. Especially since this is Strinbek, he'd get pretty huffy if you declined. Are you... Going with anyone?" God, he hoped not. Her having her own invite made things slightly less like the original plan, but --

Agatha huffed, blew a lock of errant golden hair out of her face. "Are you kidding, Gil? Everyone would assume I'm husband-hunting and the other person is the prime candidate. What other reasons do I have to show up at parties, or even spend time in Paris at all, right? _Urgh_."

"... Haha. Yes. That... does sound frustrating."

Sigh. At least she wasn't going with _Tarvek_. "Well then, I'll see--" _you there_ , he was about to say, and then Tarvek was there at the corner of the street.

"My lady, good morning!" he called out with annoying pseudo-understated enthusiasm. "Did you get an invite to the ball?"

"Yes, I did," she repeated for him, smiling and sighing both.

"Excellent. I will see you there for sure."

And now Gil was annoyed that Tarvek hadn't tried to ask her out and been rejected. Like it meant he knew her better, that he hadn't even tried.

Tarvek and Agatha fell into step, and Gil fell behind in their wake; sort of between them but... ignorable.

"Anevka suggested you and her go shopping for a dress together if you're dissatisfied with your current choices."

"Oh, yes, that's a good idea," Agatha replied, eyes lightening with honest relief. "Unless she stuffs me into something horrible for one of her plots..."

Tarvek laughed out loud. "She wouldn't dare." (Gil sort of thought she might, actually.) "And while we're on the topic, may I steal a march on everyone and ask for a dance?"

... Goddamn it.

"That is very presumptuous," Agatha said, pretending badly to be stuffy and disapproving, but her voice bubbled with amusement. Gil stuffed his hands in his pockets and tried not to hunch, even though neither of them were looking his way. Tarvek was going to notice for sure. 

"Very. I am, as you know, an incorrigible cad."

"A cad is indeed the first word I think of to describe you." 

"Oh?" Tarvek's smile was too wide, too _real_. "What's the second?"

Bang made an about-face at the end of the street and took a running leap right at the lot of them, a furry cannonball in piebald. Tarvek and Agatha dodged to the sides as she jumped, Gil ducked down, and she sailed right between where Gil and Tarvek's heads had been.

"Bangladesh, what in _hell!_ "

Snorting her irritation, she whirled on landing, yanked his satchel from his shoulder, and took off with it.

Gil was a bit glad to leave the conversation behind.

He wasn't glad when later in the day he heard through Bang's ears that this time Agatha had come in with 'you know, an actual prince, and they looked pretty dishevelled.'

He knew it was from trying to catch up with him. It didn't help.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is not betaread and due to the plot evolving a little on me i might come back three chapters later and retcon some finer details, but i was tired of sitting on it. it's not extremely likely but just be warned there's a *small* chance this may not be its final form. :p

"His Royal Highness the Prince of Skifander, the -- _Honourable_ Gilgamesh Bangladeshbrother Wulfenbach, and Lady of the Wolves Bangladesh Gilgameshsister of Wulfenbach pack!"

Swallowing a wince at the audible hitch in the announcer's voice between his two disparate titles, Gil walked through the double doors. Bangladesh took the time to sit and scratch at her ear vigorously before she followed, the fur of her ear tickled by the edge of the jaunty red kerchief she had insisted Gil tie on.

 _I can take that off, you'll still look nice,_ Gil thought at her as he scanned the parting, whispering crowd for Agatha or Tarvek, or maybe even Tarvek's creepy sister. Considering the rarefied air one had to breathe to even receive an invitation he wasn't sure he would know anyone else there -- Colette, yes, of course, but he didn't feel up to braving her inevitable entourage.

 _No, mine_ , Bang replied, walking with her ears up and her tail wagging in upcoming mayhem. Everyone had made themselves brighter for this party and she liked looking at red though Gil's eyes, was the undertone. _Phew, stinks!_ she added with a burst of approval, as she shared some lady's perfume of dead flowers and animal musk.

"My, what a remarkable coat!" someone he didn't recognize said, looking at him with eyes too bright. "What a fascinating pattern your brother has--"

"She's a sister," Gil interrupted without thinking. Bang rolled her eyes up at him and went to sniff at the lady's offered glove. "--But thank you." It was just the same kind of piebald that appeared on cows and herder dogs. Mostly a mark of awkward, plebeian breeding, for one who knew anything about wolves. That or Heterodyne ancestry. "Ah... Gilgamesh Wulfenbach. And you are?"

She giggled. Behind her, a little group of mixed genders tittered, some earnestly interested but a few looking on with winces, or smiles with a bit of an edge. "Tatiana Andreyeva, your Highness. If I may -- where _is_ Skifander?"

She seemed sincere, if airheaded. Gil scanned the group behind her a second time, Bang imitating him with her tongue lolling out in a toothy grin. _The girl with the shining claws. Smells like trickster's glee._

 _You'd recognize that,_ Gil thought back tiredly, and forced a smile. "South America, actually. I won't fault you for not having heard of them, the first contact was only thirty years into the past."

"You hardly have an accent at all!" Tatiana reassured him, and then leaned in to squint. "Actually, you don't _look_ exotic."

"... Yes, I've been told I take after my father." _Can I gnaw off my arm and leave it behind to confuse her_ , he thought to Bangladesh, who turned her muzzle up toward him and snorted. 

_My teeth are better, I can do it for you!_

She had made sure to imagine the wetly snapping tendons and the taste-feel of flinching muscles on her tongue. Gil winced inwardly. _Changed my mind. Alright, how to extricate myself--_

"Gilgamesh, dear, what a pleasure!" Agatha exclaimed just behind him. Gil whirled around, already grinning. She was hiding her answering smile -- amused, teasing, a little wry -- behind a jade-green fan.

 _Oh thank god_ , he threw out into the pack mind without thinking. 

_Just me_ , Agatha replied, with a soothing swell of amused protectiveness. She leaned past him to smile politely at Tatiana, ran a quick, less friendly eye on the rest of her friends -- still tittering about her accidental little digs -- and said, "My apologies, I will be borrowing him for now. Your Highness, if you please?"

Gil hurried to offer his arm. "--Your Grace. My pleasure." He nodded politely at the other girl, and allowed Agatha to turn him away.

In the space behind the two of them Jenka (who had a little purple hat strapped to her skull with silver ribbons) was approaching Bang's muzzle with her own to sniff without contact, like a wolf version of an air kiss. Bang wagged her tail, lolled out her tongue, fangs glistening. _Fight?_

 _Not in here with all the herd-scaredy two-legs,_ Jenka snorted back with a dash of regret. _Then they yell and tell us to go out and we can't get at the little foods table._

 _... Hmm true._ Bang lifted her head to scan the crowd, looking for the table, which -- ahh, and Jenka was telling Bang and Gil the location, complete with the layout of the room before that, the ancient humans and wolves who had taken root in the armchairs nearby, and the circuits of servants coming back and forth -- some to watch out for and some who might be convinced to drop a morsel off their platters, but most of which she still needed to run recon on before she could say for sure. Bang was immediately trying to figure out the best timing to approach the big table -- maybe start by sneaking under the far end of the table, from under the drapes? Gil lifted a hand to hide a sudden burst of laughter.

"They sound like they're planning a military operation," Agatha noted from behind her fan, eyes crinkled up in amusement behind her round glasses. 

"I don't know how well Bang would do on cooperation," Gil said, half apologetic and half laughing. _It'd work much better if Jenka can watch out for you, but then it's not fair if you don't share_ , he added, because there was no talking Bang into not trying to sneak off to kidnap a canapé or six at this point.

 _I can go_ , Jenka said, blinking innocent pale grey-blue eyes at him. _Frontal approach/hello yes what a pretty girl/shake hands? Good-girl-have-a-treat._

Bang let out a short, annoyed growl. _Boring! No._

 _How about Jenka goes_ , Agatha shared, mind sparkling with mischief underneath the false unsurprised resignation. _Yes-pretty-shake-hands, **and** watch out! servant coming back? And Bang sneaks while everyone oohhs/not looking? Jenka cons a treat and Bang steals a treat? And no sharing later. (they'd fight, Gil, you know they would.)_

The two she-wolves gave each other a measuring look. Gil smiled with cautious hope.

Then he threw a leg forward in Bang's path as she lunged before them, maw open wide. Her teeth clamped on his calf, pinched hard through his high boots; Gil hissed through his teeth, gripping at Agatha's arm for balance, but Bang checked herself before she bit through leather and skin and spat his leg back out, grumbling. 

_Not fun at all. ... Race who's first with tasty thing?_ she threw at Jenka, like she hadn't just attempted to bite her muzzle off with no provocation. Gil's hand landed on her kerchief, clenched on the copper collar underneath, and twisted it. 

"I swear to God and Saint Francis _himself_ I will _muzzle you_ if you take a _single step_ away from my side tonight," he growled quietly down at her, making sure she knew she would have to drag him if she tried to go anywhere, that he was ready to improvise a full-on harness and bridle from the heavy drapes' velvet ropes, tassels included.

God. His leg was going to be nicely bruised. He took his weight off Agatha, noticing belatedly how heavily he'd been using her to brace, wincing -- she was staring back at him with a little frown between her golden brows.

"Gil...?"

Doubt, unpleasant suspicion, _should I ask/things are wrong here_ \-- Gil pulled his arm free, throwing her a meaningless, defensive smile, started scanning the room for available drinks. "Should we lay claim to a corner of the room before the dances start, do you think, or is there anyone you still need to greet?"

"I've been here a while. Isn't there someone _you_ should greet? Like Duke Strinbeck."

Gil made a face over his shoulder, hand still closed tight around Bangladesh's collar. "Oh, believe you me, our host doesn't want to be forcefully reminded I'm even attending. Usually I just pass on these things."

"Huh. What for?" She frowned some more, scrutinizing him. Gil fought the desire to stuff his hands in his pockets. Colette would probably materialize out of thin air to murder him if he damaged his only court-worthy suit. 

"... I don't know if you've noticed yet, but they're usually pretty boring." 

Agatha sighed. "Well, depends which... I know it's a chore, believe me, but you _should_ do a little networking, Gil, and not only with fellow students. I mean, you're going to be widely connected across a lot of layers of society, which is pretty good, but--"

"Have you been talking with _Tarvek?_ " he couldn't help but snap, and immediately flinched. Oh, great, good going there, she was trying to _help_ and he just -- 

"I've been talking with me age seventeen," she retorted, sharp and firm, "which if you'll remember was _two years ago_ , when I went from a girl spare no one cared about enough to mind to a duchess inheriting the aftermath of _five centuries of war_."

Gil winced, looked down at his feet. "... Right. Sorry."

She gave a short sigh. "It's alright." It didn't sound alright.

"I'm not nobility the same way you and Tarvek are nobility," he forced out, and she turned to face him, eyebrows down, eyes intent, her mind tapping his with _yes?/listening/don't get it/ **want** to get it/ **talk**_.

Gil's mouth opened, and the announcer at the door shouted out with considerably more enthusiasm than earlier, "His Royal Highness Aaronev Tarvek Sturmvoraus, Prince of Sturmkönigreich, Duke Balan, Earl of Clairmont-Tonnerre, and Her Royal Highness Anevka Sturmvoraus, Princess of Sturmkönigreich and Sturmhalten!"

To Gil it seemed like the whole ballroom turned to watch them walk in, though when he forced himself to be reasonable it was only, oh, _half of everyone_ he saw ogling at the doors and the two redheads in shiny buttons and velvet posing there. Agatha had turned that way too, watching over the crowd with her side to Gil and her chin high; and he liked how tall she was for a lady, how stately, how imperious, and hated that he could tell the exact second Tarvek noticed her by the imperceptible smile and nod she gave back.

He didn't even _care_ about those burdensome titles, not really. It was just...

"Come on, let's find somewhere he can find us," he said, capitulating. "He's going to need to go through quite a bit of crowd before he gets to us."

 _Little foods table?_ Jenka suggested immediately. _Old people/old wolves there sitting, talking with everyone yes I'm very important and I'll like you if you let me pet your ears and make mouth noises about old forgotten things._ A brief pause. _... Also, little foods._

"... Alright."

He could still feel Jenka at the edge of his thoughts even when she stopped talking directly at him, but distant, reaching toward someone who wasn't him. Some kind of ... animal scent, strong -- a scent name, a wolf name, but without the snowy-mountain background prickle of Jenka's name for Tarvek. Maybe Vanamonde? Maybe Oggie...

 _No, Oggie is (dumb panicked sheep, churned-to-mud earth)_ , Bang flashed at him, ears pricked up in interest. She didn't know Van's scent name, though, and wasn't all that curious, the human completely inconsequential in her eyes. _Meat-eater? Small-fast-burrowing_ , she threw at him, but Gil couldn't quite visualize the animal she meant.

"What's Vanamonde's scent name?" Gil asked, he hoped casually. 

Agatha gave an unthinking snort of a laugh, still looking away into the crowd with the vagueness of a wolfbrother communicating with a packmate just out of sight. "Black coffee. Just black coffee. But apparently the most marvelous coffee of the world? With, you know, fancy imported beans."

She gave him the scent -- rich and heavy, dark like sin. Now he wanted a coffee, and he was a tea person through and through. Dang. 

Nothing like the meat-eater scent he had caught. Who else was Agatha close enough pack with? he wondered, and then berated himself for being nosy. 

Agatha took his arm again and led him at a sedate walk counterclockwise around the room, pausing here and there for a brief word, Jenka playing the demure lap wolf with a preciousness that made her look even more dainty than she truly was when contrasted with Bang's leanly muscled body and rough, spotted fur. They ran into Vanamonde -- without Oggie -- at the back of the room; he gave Gil a nod and Agatha a mind-to-mind report that Gil only caught the edges of -- too fast for words, all in notions and images in the way wolves thought, and wolves were unusually well-suited to comprehend the shifting alliances and territorial issues of high-stakes politics.

God, he missed being pack with someone. People he trusted gathering into a single hunting-mind, a point of focus seized upon, and a dozen bodies acting in unison. Getting to feel-understand- _be_ , for fleeting moments, another person, to know the paths their thoughts took and their shortcuts and assumptions and the inevitable knowledge they had that he didn't and...

His father loved to study it -- the differences in cognition, between different people and between different packs, what happened to a pack-identity if you took out or added key individuals... It _was_ fascinating to think about. 

But less fascinating than experiencing it. 

It hadn't been the same in Wulfenbach after Zeetha and Higgs left. 

Anevka's high, cultured voice, unexpectedly close, made him twitch out of his thoughts. "Your Grace, what an inimitable pleasure! And Gilgamesh, dear, it _has_ been a long time."

Ugh. He took the hand she was offering, kissed the air over the back of it with the millimeter precision he usually did not bother with, and looked up into sharp gray eyes, a gently smiling, mocking face.

"Lady Anevka."

"Oh, pish. I knew you when you were in short pants. Do call me Anevka," she said airily, and then looked down. "Nice to meet you, Lady Bangladesh."

Gil couldn't help but feel that this greeting had been more sincere and more interested than the one he'd gotten. 

The wag of a tail Anevka got in return was also entirely sincere. For a second he imagined Bang deciding to finish moving on and out of the Wulfenbach pack and bonding with her; they would be scarily well-matched...

"--Ow."

Bangladesh glared up at him and then snorted. _She's scalpel-mind, deep tiny cuts. Fun! Bleeds! **Boring**. _

_... **I** don't bleed **anything at all** , how am I less boring._

Bang snorted at him and pointedly pushed her head under Anevka's hand, even though she wasn't even one for pettings usually.

"Hmm, yes, I see what a vicious biting creature she is," Anevka mused, and Tarvek broke away from making compliments about 'the subtle use of lace' on Agatha's dress and scowled at his sister.

"She _is_."

"She is," Gil confirmed reluctantly. "I think she likes you."

Tarvek finally met his eyes -- acknowledged he was here -- and said, almost groaning with sincere misery under the urbane carelessness, "Should I speculate why?"

Snorting, Gil thought to Tarvek, _two peas in a bleeding pod_ , and it was like a small shock to remember, a second later, that he was not a wolfbrother, was not Gil's pack, was not -- linked. There. Not hearing him. 

"I think you can guess," he said awkwardly, a beat too late, and Agatha and Anevka both rolled their eyes.

"The world is doomed," Tarvek said, giving the piebald wolf stretching her neck to sniff his hand a wary look. " _Almost_ doomed. I guess I'm glad she's already taken and no unholy union can therefore happen."

"You flatter me too much, dear brother," Anevka said, and laughed behind her own fan. Gil looked away.

Well. Whether or not it was with Anevka, Bangladesh would move on if and when she felt like it, and he wasn't going to be able to hold her back when the time came.

 _(A cub wedged into a corner like an idiot, whining because it can't move forward even though its ass is entirely free to go back)_ flashed at him, edged with irritated contempt. She didn't even bite. Gil winced, sighed out the tension in his shoulders, ran a hand through his hair.

Agatha turned to face him, leaned in -- blocking Tarvek's sight, cutting Anevka out, her golden brows knit and her eyes direct as they searched his face. Her hand was on his forearm, not light and fluttery but solid -- I'm here, I'm not going away.

"Gil, it hasn't been thirty minutes, and you've been..."

"I know," he said to Agatha, apologetic, and determined not to care that the Sturmvoraus siblings were standing here and shamelessly listening in. He couldn't help but bow his head toward hers, even though that probably looked too familiar, too intimate. "Sorry. I _really_ don't like high society parties," he added quietly, with a wry, embarrassed smile, "and I think it's been kind of getting to me."

"I can see that," Agatha said with matching wryness. "Do you want me to distract you? Prod you when you falter?"

"... Sounds good," Gil said, and tried to mean it through the clinging weight of his bad mood. "Either one."

When they turned back to Tarvek and Anevka, Anevka was making a show of being entranced by her dance card, still mostly empty but with a couple names already added in. Gil wondered when any gentlemen had found the time to accost her in between the door and here. Tarvek was tittering about one of the men and his 'surprising show of ambition'.

"Oh, Agatha, that reminds me," Anevka said distractedly (Gil doubted she truly was distracted), "you should write down those two idiots before everyone gets liquored up enough to brave your wolves and fill up your whole evening."

"Oh, true." Agatha pulled her own dance card out from a hidden pocket in her skirts and frowned at it. "First dance is to one of our old allies, and second goes to Duke Strinbeck as the host, but so far the rest of my evening is free. Which one of you..."

She looked up, hesitating for once, and Gil couldn't help glancing at Tarvek. He found Tarvek glancing back, and -- he just, desperately, did not want to fight about this, did not want this to be put on the table -- Agatha's first choice, clear and unignorable.

If she had no preference of her own, did that mean she didn't see either of them that way? he couldn't help but wonder, desperate. That despite all their eager interest neither one of them had crossed her mind as _men,_ and not mere friends?

It would be even worse than losing her to Tarvek. 

"You should probably sort that out by order of precedence," Anevka advised after a few awkward seconds had gone by, leaning over Agatha's shoulder and laying a casual, gloved hand on her bare shoulder.

Gil broke eye contact with Tarvek, looked down at Bangladesh, who had sprawled against his boot and was yawning in bored frustration.

"Unless one of you objects?" Anevka added, looking at her brother with a faint smirk on her face. Tarvek frowned at her, the small imperceptible one that meant he was seriously displeased, and that he didn't want others to know. 

"Let Agatha choose," Gil forced out, voice rough, and wished Bang was sitting up and that she liked petting, so he could have something for his hands to do.

"If I chose it'd be troika waltzes all night and I wouldn't have to have my feet stepped on by old men trying to tell me they were never scared to death of my grandfather," Agatha replied drolly, dodging the topic entirely. Gil was briefly tempted to grab onto his own hair and _demand_ an answer; and then -- it'd end up causing a scene, probably, what a grand idea -- chickened out. "Who even has precedence between you, if you're both princes? Apparently Tarvek is also a duke..."

"It's a matter of debate," Gil said. Out in the crowd he could see a young Archduke he remembered debating it with, back when they'd been children. There had been rocks involved.

"It's not, actually," Tarvek said in such a dispassionate voice Gil couldn't help but stare at him. Tarvek was fussing with his gloves and his eyelids were hanging heavy, like the topic bored him. "He has a reigning parent; I do not."

He flung Gil a sharp look and for a second Gil thought he had actually said, _I don't understand why you keep insisting it is._

"Huh." Agatha's eyes flicked from Tarvek's face to Gil's, slightly narrowed in thought; Gil fought not to look away too tellingly, and probably failed. "Well then." She wrote in _Gilgamesh Bangladeshbrother Wulfenbach_ for the third dance with a graphite pencil without asking him again, and kept going on to the next line, Tarvek -- Huh. 

"It's Aaronev Tarvek, technically," Gil told her quietly as she scratched the straight downward slash of the first letter she'd started to put down that wasn't an S. "You probably don't have to bother with the full names anyway, you know who we are."

Agatha's brows went down stubbornly as she glared at her card. "I know. I just figured this is my first one, I ought to do it properly."

"You didn't have a débutante ball?" Tarvek inquired, clearing his throat, and Gil wondered if the topic of his name bothered him, and what about it. Tarvek actually being a middle name? Being the fourth Aaronev in a row? Gil wasn't sure. It didn't seem like it should.

"I'd been about to, and then Grandfather died." She shrugged. "Then Kolya had to throw a ball for his ascension to the duchy so the neighbors wouldn't think he was going to restart the war just because, and that kind of took precedence; and then I was in Beetleburg, so it never really happened. To be fair I didn't mind, Mother had been doing her best to make something ridiculously overwrought out of it, you'd have thought I was to be queen regnant -- or _she_ was. And she wanted all the wolves barred from the town for the duration, too. So they wouldn't scare all the _international guests_."

She scoffed. Gil cracked a smile. "Your mother sounds a bit--"

"A _bit_ ," Agatha echoed, rolling her eyes. "Lovely woman. She's so busy these days flitting between London and Hamburg and wherever else, I'm very sad I don't see more of her." 

Gil got a very strong flash-echo of another woman in cheaper dress, brown hair braided in a crown, crinkled eyes on her almost-pretty face. _Nursemaid/protector/guide/friend, her I miss. (her I would call mother.)_

"... But anyway. I should locate my first dance partner."

"It's _his_ job to locate you, Agatha dear," Anevka said, laughing politely. 

Agatha arched an eyebrow. "Another power play? Hmph."

Tarvek opened his mouth to no doubt add something unctuous about the necessity and subtleties of the game, and then paused, an odd look on his face, and stared at Gil with his eyebrows scrunched over his little spectacles. 

"... Wulfenbach? Where's Bangladesh?"

Swearing vilely, Gil whirled around on the spot, mind casting out for an echo.

Bang was predictably making her way behind the drapes toward the buffet table.

\--

 _Can I dance with Jenka_ , Bangladesh asked him during the second dance, sending images of two mutually-orbiting wolves, sidestepping in unison, as an imaginary Gil and Agatha twirled beside them in a noxious cloud of merged scent-names. Cake, coffee -- engine grease? -- and Gil's own slightly-singed feathers and ozone, layered with the meaty tang of blood and entrails and something even stronger, wilder, that only made Bang's scent name worse. Nose wrinkling, Gil remembered belatedly that charming Jenka's wolf name was _bear over a kill_.

"Is there something wrong?" Tatiana Andreyeva asked him with her voice trembling, and Gil promptly stubbed his booted toes over her slippers-wearing feet.

"Oh -- sorry! Sorry, I told you I was bad at dancing. It's nothing, my sister is talking to me." The girl blinked her incomprehension; Gil moved her bodily away from another couple. "My _wolf_ -sister," he added tiredly. "She wants to dance."

"Oh, how cute! And why shouldn't she?"

 _Because she wants to dance with fangs involved_ , Gil did not answer. God did he regret being so susceptible to guilt, and _knowing_ the little bout of social engineering that had a group of random friends bemoaning Tatiana's lack of partner for the second dance in his hearing had been a trap, and springing it even so.

Anyway it was boring to watch Agatha dance with older, predatory-looking men and Tarvek with some countess or other who wanted her wrinkles flattered. 

_**Very** boring,_ Bang grumbled from the sidelines where she lay on her barrel with her head on the floor, looking dejectedly murderous.

"She'd -- bump into lots of people," Gil improvised, a beat late, when he realized the girl was still waiting for an answer.

Over her shoulder he caught a glimpse of gray eyes under red hair, flashing at him, and frowned in question -- Tarvek rolled his eyes briefly and gave a pointed, eyebrows-underlined look at ... Gil's hand on the girl's waist? It was perfectly decorous --

... She _was_ leaning a little close, huh. He made his hold firmer, took her on a slightly faster spin to re-establish distance, and made sure not to let his arm yield when she pressed back in.

The flash of _thwarted_ on her face... 

When Gil trod upon her foot, it was completely boorish, unbefitting of a well-taught prince (hah), and entirely on purpose.

"Oh, so very sorry! Did I hurt you?" He aimed her toward the edge of the room, where people danced slower, or stood or walked with their friends waiting for the next dance, and he slowed them down. Bangladesh was up on her feet and waiting for them, tongue lolling, a faint growl rolling out almost like a chuckle.

"No, I'm fine, the dance isn't --"

"I insist, you must sit down, make sure your foot is alright. I know I'm heavy," he added with a small, mostly fake smile. _Bang, get me a distraction in fifteen... ten..._

No sooner was Tatiana Andreyeva seated in an armchair in the middle of a gaggle of doddering old people than a great crash was ringing through the ballroom, clinking over the music. Oh lord. Maybe Gil hadn't needed an escape _that badly_. He whirled around -- to find Bangladesh in the middle of a wide empty space, standing with her front and back paws straddling across a sprawled-out waiter boy, grazing peacefully on champagne-soaked canapés. There was broken glass in the middle of a golden, fizzy puddle, the edge of it staining her paws.

"Oh no -- my apologies -- she'll step on glass, pardon me," he threw, and hurried to his wolf-sister, who... against the odds, had actually managed to do a lot less damage than he had first assumed. Waiters fell sometimes, that just... that was something that happened, and the waiter looked more stunned and intimidated than hurt. "Bangladesh, step back, now -- I'm sorry, my good man, are you alright?"

Phew. Safe.

 _Well-done?_ Bangladesh inquired carelessly, licking her paw clean of champagne as Gil tried to wipe her other, firmly-planted feet with a hand towel the steward had handed him.

"You got canapés out of it, I guess that worked out for everyone. Stop licking that, you'll get drunk. Do you even like the taste or are you doing it just because I want you to stop?"

_It makes things fun, panicky-sheep says. (huh, prickly.)_

"For Saint Francis's sake, don't take drinking advice from _Oggie_."

"And what's wrong with Oggie, exactly," Agatha asked over his shoulder. Gil jumped. She was standing there at the edge of the alcove he had herded Bang into, tapping on her wrist with her fan, an eyebrow pointedly arched. He could feel her fighting down a smile.

"--Is it our dance already?" Gil jumped to his feet. "Argh. Sorry."

Jenka leaned past Agatha's skirts to sniff at Bang's paws, ears flicking against the edges of her fashionable little hat. Bang snorted at her and lifted her head proudly. 

"We can dance later in the evening, if you need to--"

"No! No. I wouldn't get it all out of her fur without an actual bath. Maybe being a little drunk will mellow her out," Gil muttered without too much hope, and offered his arm. 

Agatha snorted and led the way out, pulling Gil to her side. He went, trying not to feel giddy at the sudden contact, at the mass of skirts frothing against his leg. Jenka led the way and Bang followed, grumbling -- and then snaked around Gil to walk shoulder to shoulder with her, throwing the other she-wolf little side-eyes.

"I don't _think_ this is a volkwaltz," Agatha mused, eyeing the wolves as they walked out onto the dance floor, "but we could try to make it one. Steinbeck doesn't look like he has a single wolfbrother dance planned out. At least it's not on my card."

"He's unwolfed and bitter," Tarvek threw in an undertone as he appeared out of the crowd at Gil's side, "so it wouldn't be."

Gil blinked, catching glimpses of him passing behind them to swan off to his next partner, then disappearing again. Agatha snorted, an amused half-smile on her face. "He's so _slippery_ at parties, I don't know how he does it."

"No kidding," Gil replied drolly. "... I'm pretty sure Bang has no idea how to do any kind of wolfbrother dance. I didn't teach her, at any rate."

 _I'll show her,_ Jenka said simply, like it was a foregone conclusion. 

Agatha blinked. "How do _you_ know, though? I mean, I probably shouldn't be surprised, but..."

Jenka threw a scent name in the pack sense between them -- or maybe two, disparate but tightly linked. _People-wolves taught them, I listened? It was easy._

Agatha's hand tightened on Gil's arm and he could feel a spike of sudden -- pain?, some violent emotion that tightened his throat, made his eyes prickle. He stared at Agatha but her chin was up and she was glaring ahead like a challenge, eyes not even glistening a little bit.

"What--"

 _Kolya Barry. Rerich. Dead. I'm fine, just didn't expect it._ A deep breath. _Makes sense that they were taught the dances. Kolya was the heir, was in town (I wasn't), and there's -- parties, officials to greet (Grandfather to impress). I wasn't wolfed until I came back and everybody but Uncle Faustus was dead._

Gil was gentle when he took her hand and turned to face her, waiting for the waltz to start, eyes soft in sympathy, but the firm set of her chin told him she was determined not to have anymore violent emotions in public. Which... yes, it was a spectacularly bad place for it. 

She flicked him a tiny smile in thanks. Gil smiled back, his eyes in hers.

As the music started they took a gliding step together and then two, the she-wolves play-bowing to each other, Bang challenging but willing to follow Jenka's lead for now, if only so she could best her at that game later.

One step and two steps and a first whirl -- 

And then he could feel her body from the inside, muscles and tendons, the way her weight would shift on her feet, in her hips, the way she planned to move in his hold -- how to hold her _better_ , give more support, how to turn inside-and-around the trajectory of the two she-wolves beside them without collisions. Four bodies and -- not quite one mind, but a _presence_ building between them that wasn't any of them only.

That was... a lot more than just the four of them. Behind Agatha and Jenka there were whispers of more -- wolves, people, stretching out into the mist of distance, a spiderweb of bonds he could only catch glimpses of. Surprisingly there were more close presences than just Oggie and Van, more of her pack in Paris -- but he couldn't get a good feel for them, and then he got distracted by Agatha's dimpling grin and the gleam in her eyes.

 _Not a pack hunt,_ she thought at him, _but still nice._

 _Very, very nice._ (He thought about Zeetha and Higgs, a pack of three on children's adventures, about joining the greater Wulfenbach pack on boar hunts and searches for bandits, for village children in a harsh winter's storm, about--) (god he missed having a pack, he missed the certainty of his human sister and their common brother-wolf, a permanent (he'd thought) triumvirate, he missed knowing he belonged and wouldn't -- wouldn't...)

(Be alone.)

( _Kolya_ ) echoed back at him without Agatha's conscious input and they both closed their eyes tight, breathed out, trying to shed the tightness in their chests that was making Jenka and Bangladesh flinch with confused worry.

"I suggest we find another topic of conversation," Gil said as lightly as he could.

"Suggestion approved," Agatha said wryly. "How about Professor Waussner's class."

"Oh lord, that homework is going to kill me with pointlessness," Gil said through a sudden grin. Agatha chuckled, nodding sadly, and they were off, spending the rest of the dance whirling and laughing about how out of his depth the dear Professor was.

It almost didn't hurt, handing her over to Tarvek when the music and the wolves stopped. His awareness of her ebbed away as her hand passed from his to Tarvek's and then he was alone with Bang in his head and it was... It was a bit difficult.

"I should find Colette," he said abruptly, and bowed to the two of them. "Later, then."

He walked away but Bang didn't, hesitating -- wanting to whirl and dodge and almost-bite with Jenka more, wanting to figure out the way she moved so next time they fought for real Bangladesh would be ready.

(Also wanting to make Tarvek dance.)

 _... Go dance with Jenka, but if you bite Tarvek and Agatha stabs you I'm not going to say a single thing about it,_ Gil decided, and slipped between two groups of people without her, hands in pockets once again.

He could feel her wagging her tail even as her attention turned away from him and she stalked them onto the dance floor.

Ugh. Maybe he should find himself a drink, and hopefully it would mellow him out and not make him maudlin. ... He should make sure it was a single drink and not two, though.

"It's _charming_ how close you and dear Agatha seem to be," a low, oddly familiar woman's voice said, coming from behind him. The woman, when Gil turned to look at her, was a complete stranger. Plush, expertly rouged lips quirked in a teasing-inviting smirk almost distracted from the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the only hint that she was a day over thirty. "Quite heartening! The dear girl certainly needs more well-born friends."

She had Duke Strinbeck on her arm; the man gave Gil a pinched, nose-in-the-air look, somehow failed to say a thing about how much he disapproved of introducing his obviously favored guests to _him_. Gil swallowed down the 'and who ( _the hell_ ) are you' he'd so dearly wanted to throw. He couldn't, not in front of the host.

"I'm sorry, Madame," Gil said, bowing his head, "I don't--"

"What _is_ your name, darling?" she interrupted, laughing like a cascade of charming little bells. "I was so sure I knew all the princes in Paris there were to know. That will teach me to be so fashionably late."

"Well, you are _very_ fashionable," Gil felt compelled to say -- artless, but. It was what Tarvek would have said, wasn't it? Something like it, if better turned...

"What a charmer," the lady said with an airy little chuckle, and Duke Strinbeck's mouth pursed some more.

"May I introduce his Highness Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, Prince of _Skifander_." 

Gil's eyes narrowed. He made it sound like the country was _made-up_ \--

The long, inviting smile on the woman's mouth fell. Huh. 

"Wulfenbach. Huh. Really. That's... _Interesting_ , why, history repeats itself, it seems!"

"--Beg your pardon?"

The smile she sent him was polite now, perfunctory. "Oh, I would stop and tell you all about it, dear boy, but it does seem I've got several more old acquaintances to greet. Joseph, darling, do you mind?"

"Naturally not, my lady," Strinbeck said, and led her stiff-backedly away without a single glance back. 

Gil was left standing there and blinking, wondering what on earth had just happened. He was no stranger to rudeness -- Strinbeck was almost comforting in how familiar his attitude was, lack of even perfunctory goodbyes and all -- but he had no idea what to make of the whirlwind of friendly-faced interrogation. She reminded him of a more smarmy Anevka, actually, only Anevka would never be so crass as to call total strangers pet names. 

Or at least if she did it she would be more upfront about them being meant as insults.

Ugh, and there went Colette, dancing with some guy, so he couldn't even find her in the crowd either. He found a bit of wall to prop up, snatched a champagne flute from a passing tray, and settled in to glower sightlessly at the dance floor.

 _Gil!_ Agatha's mind-voice called from across the room, a brouhaha of _worried/baffled/nervous/what??_ pressing up behind it. 

Gil straightened up. The waltz was still playing, another minute and a half at least left; for long seconds he couldn't find them in the crowd. Too many redheads with Tarvek's exact shade -- ah, right, Bangladesh was with them, so they should be... He briefly met Agatha's eyes as she whirled on the dance floor, and then Tarvek's, frowning straight at him, as he aimed their steps closer to the edge of the dance floor.

_I'm fine?_

Agatha's response was a confusing burst of wordless frustration, but at least she didn't abandon Tarvek in the middle of the song. That... would probably have looked bad for him. Embarrassing. The second the music stopped, though, they were there, meeting him at the edge of the floor.

"What--"

"Where did she _go?_ " Agatha snapped, cutting looks right and left. Her hand was clenched on Tarvek's elbow; Jenka's head was low and forward like she was on a hunt as she pressed her nose to Gil's leg trying to find a scent. Bang, following, seemed pretty nonplussed about it, stealing the silvery she-wolf constant side-looks, and only shouldering her off Gil as an afterthought.

"That was Lucrezia Mongfish-Heterodyne," Tarvek told him, eyebrows slightly furrowed. 

"That was my _mother!_ What did she _want?_ "

"--Oh." Gil blinked. Then frowned. "The mother you say you haven't seen for --"

Agatha _growled,_ teeth flashing under her lip. " _Yes_."

"Huh." Gil blinked again. "She was trying to figure out who I was, she saw us dancing. Said something about being glad you were making well-born friends," he added with a snort. Agatha's eyes were hard enough to cut yourself on. "I take it that's not... likely?"

Agatha snorted her disdain. "What's likely is her accosting Tarvek next." _All that's yours is mine, dear daughter! (All that's mine is still only mine.)_

Gil grimaced. _Eugh gross wrong._

"I am...Not actually a stranger to her," Tarvek said delicately, and Agatha and Gil blinked at him. He cleared his throat, spread his hands out like admitting powerlessness, asking for peace. "My father's been a lifelong friend of hers. We... actually, she was staying at the castle for a couple of months, before he had his -- downturn."

"Your father had a downturn?" Gil couldn't help but ask, baffled. 

"We don't know what he had," Tarvek admitted, mouth twisted in bitter resignation. "He's always been _distractible_ , it's just a lot worse now."

Gil hesitated -- he'd always wondered, in between telling himself he didn't care and it wasn't like they were friends; it was nothing but curiosity... "That's why you had to leave last year?"

Tarvek sighed, nodded -- answered easily, like he didn't mind Gil knowing. "Anevka wrote me to come back, because he wouldn't have. We suspected a stroke, or some kind of brainstorm, but the signs are not clear-cut. He doesn't seem to notice any difference, himself. We've tried to point things out and he thinks we're just being silly."

Gil didn't have any idea what to say to that. 

Agatha seemed to have known some of this, but not the details either, and she patted his arm awkwardly. "That sounds... actually a little terrifying. I'm sorry." 

Gil stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels, struck by the strange urge to give Tarvek's shoulder an awkward pat of his own.

"No matter," Tarvek said abruptly. "To return to your mother, I've seen her here and there while growing up, and she was around for a couple of days when I got home last year, so she'll certainly remember what I look like now. Is that going to be a problem?" he added delicately. "I understand being worried about Gil--"

"Hey, what does _that_ mean?"

"That she's a consummate socialite and politician," Tarvek retorted cynically. "Not to say you're _utterly_ defenseless in high society, but..."

"Oh, you mean she's more like _you_ ," Gil shot back. "Well, I seem to be dealing alright."

"The difference is Tarvek doesn't want to use you," Agatha said darkly. "The only way to deal with her is to make yourself _boring,_ and hope she goes away."

_(Yes, Mother. Of course, Mother. Uh huh. I don't know, Mother, I never thought that far. I guess I can try to learn how to 'handle people' if you really think -- no? Never mind? Well, alright, I'm sorry.)_

Wincing, Gil ducked his head, tried not to hunch. He wasn't sure Agatha had meant to share that.

"Well, um. She heard my name and suddenly had something to do elsewhere. Said something about history repeating itself. I'm not sure why, she's a duchess, my father is just a baron...?"

"She was a duke's heir's wife," Agatha corrected with dry impatience. "And then my father never got to be a duke anyway. By birth she's an earl's daughter. ...Did she know your parents maybe?"

"No idea," Gil replied with baffled honesty. "But anyway it looks like she gave up, so maybe you should get to your fifth dance, poor Lord Bellamont seems distressed."

Sighing, Agatha forcefully loosened her shoulders (Gil tore his eyes away from their soft, exposed skin and their slope), gave Tarvek's arm a pat, Gil a curt nod, and turned to face Lord Bellamont. Gil and Tarvek were left standing face to face in awkward, slightly tense silence.

"What kind of trouble do you think...?" Gil made himself ask, because he wasn't sure what a widowed socialite could even do to him that would matter in the end, or why she would bother -- apart from, he supposed, some kind of 'I'm still woman enough to steal my daughter's beaus' personal satisfaction, but frankly that had just about zero chance of happening. She _was_ pretty on the outside, but the inside that the behavior implied was pretty ugly.

"Mostly social embarrassment, I would think, but you're no stranger to that."

"Hey!"

Tarvek pulled out a kerchief, whipped Bangladesh on the muzzle with it, and started industriously cleaning his pince-nez. "I'm sure she has agendas of her own, but I completely fail to see how _you_ might fit into them, so probably it's only going to be personal annoyances and the like."

Gil wrinkled his nose. "Well, it's not like I attend a lot of balls, anyway. Should I tell you to be cautious of her wiles? I mean, you probably look a lot like your dad in his young age."

"... You are _vile_."

Gil smirked and turned his side to Tarvek's shoulder, bumped into him. "Yep, Prince Ill-bred, that's me." Tarvek shot him a familiar look full of frustrated loathing and made a show of dusting his shoulder. Grinning, Gil moved away from him, waving his hand carelessly. "Alright, I'll try to catch Colette, see you later. Come on, Bang."

Wagging her tail, Bangladesh jumped on Tarvek a last time and then bounded after him. Gil pushed his way through the crowd, hands firmly in pockets.

He wasn't too sure how he felt, learning so much, sharing so much, in such a public place; it was uncomfortable, and sad, and he wasn't enjoying it, but... It was closeness, too. Trust. He couldn't help but be glad to have been entrusted with so much.

(He couldn't help but think about his childhood in this place, surrounded by dukes and counts and princes, and it wasn't pleasant. But at least he had always known it wasn't a lack of love that stopped his mother visiting.) 

(Or his father listening.)


	3. Chapter 3

_To my Son and Heir, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, care of Madame Lafitte in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris_

_Hoping this missive will find you Still in good health,_

_I don't know where you encountered Lucrezia Mongfish, but pray do not encounter her again if you can at All help it. Unleash Bangladesh as a distraction and leave through a servant's passage if you must. She is a pleasantly Vicious creature and while our old quarrel is nowadays mostly Buried I would rather she does not take it into her head to use you against me, thinking me out of reach to counteract._

_I will preempt your inevitable questioning by saying that you have no need of knowing exactly what the quarrel was; suffice to say there was One, of consequent import, and leave it at that._

_You probably do remember my boyhood friends Bill and Barry, who came often to stay with us when you and Zeetha were young children, and who we saw afterwards at Parties and somesuch. Bill, that is, William Heterodyne, was Lucrezia's Husband, and therefore I suppose him the Father of this Agatha you are telling me about._

_While Bill himself was a trustworthy friend and passionately devoted to justice and the end of War, toward which he toiled Greatly, Lucrezia often used his beliefs and her charms to manipulate him to her selfish ends. Furthermore, his father, Duke Saturnus of Mechanicsburg, who, declaring Bill unfairly Unfit, demanded legal custody of Bill's firstborn son and I presume all his children thereafter, was, while unlikely to bend to Lucrezia's whims, a bloody-minded warmonger in his own right and ferociously hostile to all outsiders to his own Pack. I do not know which parent or grandparent your Friend takes most after, but I would prefer you did not get involved with young Agatha more than Absolutely Necessary._

_(I will inquire: what does Bangladesh think of her?)_

_But let us talk no more of this distasteful thing. On another topic, pray do talk sense into your Sister in your next missive. She has been bragging to me of she and Higgs making friends with those devil-damned Coyotes, which Barry told me in one of his Last missives seem to be cousins to our own Wolves, and the closest to them of all Beasts in ability; only instead of using their ability to touch minds to Bond as a family and Unify their purpose as the noble Wolf does, they turn it outwards to trick the unwary to their Doom._

_Which, while fascinating, you will agree is Not safe. Your sister of course immediately decided she must thereafter talk to every single warren of them that she finds in her travels. She has no idea whether they're trustworthy, and what the local Indians will think of her communing with Trickster beasts. They do not have our own wolves there, Canis dirus familiaris, they have only the smaller, mind-blind Canis lupus vulgaris subtype, and do not understand the Bond of Pack; I fear they may Turn on her, if the coyotes do not._

_All is well otherwise on our lands; the pack is healthy, Helga delivered of three male cubs a week ago, and the harvest looks Quite promising indeed, with no sign of blight or untimely hail so far._

_I will leave you here; you will find enclosed your Mother's latest missive wherein she wishes you good health and prosperity and a request for more frequent Correspondence, as you are not in reach for her sending out her Army should you run into Parisian trouble._

_With sincere regard,_

_Your father, Klaus Wulfenbach, Baron Wulfenbach_

\--

"Well, so it does turn out our fathers _were_ friends some fifteen or twenty years back," Gil said, still staring down at his letter. He'd wanted to let Agatha read it -- at least the part about their old friendship -- but... Trust his father to be completely paranoid, and to also say some things about her mother and grandfather that Agatha was bound not to like, even if they were true and she was already aware of them. And then he'd gone and laid down his unfounded suspicions about Agatha herself in clear words. Gil's father had a gift for stark, unforgiving wording and even more unforgiving paranoia.

"Oh?" Agatha inquired, looking up from her own correspondence. Vanamonde also looked up, eyebrows arched.

The three of them were sitting together at a round coffee table right on the sidewalk, under a cheery cloth awning. It was still sunny out, a warm, pleasant autumn afternoon. Jenka and Oggie bracketed Agatha's chair, half-asleep on their water bowls. Bangladesh was... around, in some tiny backstreet, nosing at some sewer grate or other; Gil was trying not to worry too much. She would bring him the mangled corpse of a feral cat or a gigantic rat, for sure, but hopefully nothing worse.

"He says your father and uncle used to visit when I was small. I have... two, three years on you?"

"So at best you would have been five and I would have been two. Hm."

"And by that point my father didn't leave Wulfenbach much anymore, so I couldn't have visited you instead. He says I still saw them around at parties and such for a few years afterwards but you would still have been in the nursery..." He didn't know if he was disappointed or not. Knowing her all along would have been good -- Agatha knew her own mind, and was brilliant besides; he thought if they had been friends as children she would not have let wagging tongues discourage her.

On the downside he might not see her as the remarkable woman she was now if he had known her first as a snotty toddler.

Then again he might still have, since they would only have seen each other once a year at best... Agh. No matter. He knew her now.

"Anyway. He apparently had something of a feud with your mother, but of course he won't tell me what about." Gil frowned; his father sounded so _wary_ of her. "He doesn't mention what my mother thought of the whole thing."

"Well. It might not be so surprising that they knew each other," Van pointed out casually. "Your lands _are_ pretty close to Mechanicsburg. And Agatha's father and paternal uncle... ah."

"Did not like to stay in town very much," she finished dryly, eyes tight at the corners. She then sighed, shoulders slumping. "Ugh. Never mind them, they've been dead for years, and they were gone for years before that, it's not _their_ fault this time." She glared at her empty cake plate. "I was having such a grand time in Paris. Trust my mother to smell something to ruin from several countries away."

Gil nudged his untouched cake plate toward her side of the table; Agatha considered it for a few seconds before saying, "you know what, _thank_ you," and sliding it the rest of the way in front of her.

She was raising her dessert fork to it when she paused, head tilting, and Oggie and Jenka's ears flicked up. Oggie stood, tail starting to wag; Gil craned his neck to look behind him, and sure enough a wolf and his person passed the corner of the street a mere second later. The wolf was a glossy, blueish-purple black, perfect conformation save for oddly long legs and a pair of overgrown fangs pushing out from under his closed lips. The human...

Looking for the wolfbrother moving in tandem with the beast, Gil's eyes slid over her once before they caught on the petite girl in servant's clothes and dark, deeply auburn hair that followed with her hands joined modestly over her white apron.

(Which. He'd done that with Agatha too. He really needed to stop it.)

"Maxim! Violetta!" Agatha grinned, flicked her fingers in greeting. The black dog-wolf pranced forward, feet kicking high like a show horse -- and was promptly pounced by Oggie to be given an ear licking, which he did not seem to appreciate. Jenka sat up growling under her breath in grumpy sleepiness; as the dog-wolves rolled around in the gutter the servant girl came to a demure stop by the table and curtsied.

"Lady Agatha, Herr von Mekkhan, hello. Hello, sir."

"How are you?" Agatha said with a sincere smile as from a flicker of a glance from her Vanamonde pulled a chair from another table and presented it gallantly. "Won't you sit with us?"

"Oh, it wouldn't be proper--"

"I will bribe you with Gil's cake." Agatha glanced at Gil himself. "If you don't mind?"

Laughing a little, Gil shook his head. He'd wanted Agatha to feel better; it looked like the new girl was doing that.

"... Well, if there is cake -- no, wait, if someone sees me--"

"Take off your apron and they shall see naught but three wolfbrothers and a hanger-on," Van said with a faint smirk on his face, his eyes sneaking to Gil to point out who the hanger-on was in that scenario. Chuckling, Gil turned the little table to make more space by the window, so that the girl's chair would be shielded from view somewhat.

"You would be Violetta Maximsister, then? I'm Gil Bangladeshbrother. It's nice to meet you."

Said Maxim had freed himself from Oggie's unfair assault and now had his head pushed on Agatha's lap, whining sulkily. Distracted by Agatha's gloved hands combing through drool-glued fur, Gil almost missed Violetta's hesitation.

"Ah, he's not -- I mean, I don't think--"

Agatha was still raking her fingers through drooly fur. "They're still wolf-courting, I think, not yet wolf-wedded."

Agatha and Violetta stared at each other with the look of people talking through the pack bond, and then Agatha waved at the chair Violetta was still hovering over; Violetta let herself drop on it with a defeated sigh, and quickly saw to unknotting her apron strings and hiding the telltale white cloth in a fold of her skirts.

Gil blinked down at Maxim; Violetta was between sixteen and twenty years of age -- he had trouble being sure of either direction, but still young enough for a first bonding -- but Maxim was nowhere near being a cub. Not _old_ either, but well-settled, quite adult. "Huh."

Vanamonde made a show of sipping his coffee. "Heterodyne wolves, what can you do."

"I've mostly heard rumors and nothing substantial," Gil pointed out. "For how common they are in the countryside, people who do bond Heterodyne don't really talk much about it afterwards."

Vanamonde and Agatha smirked mysteriously into their cups. Violetta cleared her throat and poked at the cake with the pastry fork Agatha had pushed into her hand a minute ago.

"Well, they, uh. They're a bit more. Open? About these things. You know. And I'll... just eat this cake." Violetta shoved a forkful of cake into her mouth, face red, as Van tsked playfully at her.

"Clearly I should bribe you to share your intelligence before you're totally compromised," Gil teased. Violetta coughed on her mouthful.

"Oh my god, that sounded _just like Tarvek_."

Gil startled. "You know Tarvek?"

"He's my _cousin!_ Sort of. Not _officially_ my cousin, because I'm a servant. You know." She waved her free hand vaguely. Gil couldn't help but grin, entertained by the way she gesticulated, even if he hadn't expected her to be linked to _him_. And here Gil had thought he could enjoy his time with Agatha without mentions of her other suitor to come and remind them of his current absence... Eh.

"I see -- uh, cousin not sister, right, I had a horrible thought for a moment. Sorry."

"... If _old Aaronev_ was my _father_ I might just go and leave for the Americas," Violetta said with sincere dread. "No, it was farther up. You don't mind, do you?" she added with sudden sharpness, and then Gil figured out she hadn't shared that tidbit of bastard ancestry by accident.

Wich. He should have known that straight on. He _knew_ the Wulfenbach barony was seen as weird for not shaming the natural children born of wolf heats and summer festivals. But he wasn't sure why she would want to test him on _that_...

"My mother's a queen regnant from the Amazonian forest in South America who decided she wanted her consort to be a lowly European baron's third son," he replied drolly. "I mean, he wasn't even my grandfather's heir when we were _born_. My sister's her heir, but for half of America and most of Europe we may as well be the queen's bastard children, Zeetha and I."

" _Huh_."

Gil shrugged loosely. "By the way, she's currently in America, but in the north. If you want to go one day, I can write her to look out for you. She's apparently making friends with coyotes."

"... That sounds almost nice." Violetta sighed mournfully and ate another forkful. "Wilderness. Coyotes. Why do I have obligations here, again?"

Agatha chuckled. "Tarvek probably told you there was no one else he could trust, looking nobly regretful."

"And then I kicked him, and then I _believed him anyway_. Ugh."

"Well, to be fair, it probably is true. Which doesn't mean he didn't use it to pull your strings, but."

Violetta grimaced some more; Agatha patted her hand sympathetically, mouth pinched to keep from laughing.

"That family," Violetta said somberly. Gil bit his lip to keep from agreeing out loud. It wasn't like he was a part of it -- or like the Sturmvorauses were _particularly_ awful amongst higher European nobility.

Well. Maybe slightly more awful, but not hugely so.

It was odd, thinking of Tarvek and trust. He couldn't help but feel, bitter, that Tarvek probably trusted the girl to do as he needed, but that he still wasn't going to share his thoughts and reasons with her -- and who knew whether she could trust him in return, should she need it.

Ugh! He was over it. They got along almost alright nowadays, as long as he didn't think too much about--

"Wait." Violetta stared at him, the fork raised, forgotten. " _You're_ his Prince Gilgamesh!"

Gil's face heated up and he leaned back, hands on the table, in confusion. " _What_?"

"I don't know how many _times_ he badgered me with his _Prince Gil did this, Prince Gil did that_ when we were kids, it was annoying. Every time he would come back from some grand ball or other he'd try to get me to reenact some idiotic tree-climbing adventure you guys went on."

Her eyes narrowed as Gil was still staring dumbly, tongue tied.

"And then you broke his heart, apparently."

Gil only realized he had stood up when Agatha caught his sleeve in her fingers and arched her eyebrow pointedly at him, as if to ask why he was suddenly trying to shove the table off him. Vanamonde's hands were pressed to the tabletop to keep it from toppling over with their drinks and empty plates.

"Oh. Um. Sorry." He sat back down, sheepish and face burning. "I... _what_?"

"You were best friends and then you weren't? I never got the full story, only that your name was now taboo on His Pompous Majesty's lands or something."

\--Oh. Best _friends_. Hah. What else had he thought --

... _Best_ friend. Wow.

Agatha leaned forward, fingers of both hands joined in a pointy triangle in front of her chin, and peered at him narrowly through her spectacles. "Oh, yes, I've been meaning to _ask_."

_More like ask/interrogate/thumbscrews?!, harrumph._

Gil's face, which had started to cool down, flamed up once more.

"How is that even -- he didn't even _know_ I was a prince, I didn't tell people --"

Violetta was looking at him like he was a bit daft. "Uh, if you were invited to the same parties, you'd have been _announced_?"

"But I was never _around_ to be announced! I kept to the stables and the gardens and -- and I was there with my father and the _pack_ and--"

"It's Tarvek," Agatha said with some hint of fondness. "He probably made it a point to find out before the second time you met."

The second time. _Oh it's you again/honest delight_ hidden under already-polished indifference, _let me boss-I-mean-show you around because you know nothing_ , the exact same I'm Seven And Very Serious I Should Not Be Tempted By Lowborn Anything Oh Who Am I Kidding.

He thought it was the secret base in the peach trees, the second time, or maybe the pond, laughter, silk socks ruined. Maybe both.

"He didn't _know_ I was a prince," Gil insisted, shaking his head. "It's when he found out that --"

 _(Oh. Best friends.)_ It kept running in his head. _Best friends._

He'd thought they were best friends, too, at the time. He had his sister at home -- and he had the household staff's children, but none of those were close in age and...

"What did happen?" Agatha asked quietly. Gil shook his head again. He didn't want to bring it up here, at a café, with Tarvek's _cousin_ in attendance. He didn't want Tarvek to hear he still cared. "...Gil?"

He couldn't even tell her mind-to-mind. She was pack with everyone in attendance here. It might echo out.

Agatha frowned, looking impatient -- looking like she thought he was being unreasonable, like she trusted Tarvek more, like she was on _his_ side _\--_

"He used me," he said brusquely. "He _used_ me, his father did not like it, my father liked it even _less_ , I was left stranded in the middle to take the fall, I _don't want_ to talk about it. Have you tried asking him?"

"Yes," Agatha said, eyes still narrowed. "He said it was a childish dispute that snowballed."

... Childish. Like Gil would react any different if it happened now, as an adult. _Childish_. He worked on his breathing, hands clenched on his knees under the table, telling Bang he was safe and she didn't need to come back and hunt down anyone for him.

"He said it in a very unconvincing way, if that helps."

"... A little." Gil snorted. "A very little."

Agatha sighed, reclined in her seat, and both her hands found wolf muzzles to pet, Maxim and Oggie both nosing up at her. Jenka looked supremely unbothered.

Oggie looked at Gil, tilted his head. _Not pack? (Little beast in snow) and (singed feathers and ozone) growl/wary/bite?_ The undertone was a bit nonplussed, like Vanamonde's wolf had expected or hoped otherwise. Huh. Gil hadn't thought Vanamonde cared.

"I don't," Vanamonde said casually, slicing him a dispassionate look. "Oggie does. He likes people to get along."

Violetta was eating her cake and saying nothing, but her eyes darted between Gil and Agatha's faces with animal swiftness. Gil sighed, worked on loosening his shoulders, on reclining in his seat. It wasn't Agatha's fault she had known Tarvek longer, hadn't seen exactly how far he might go in pursuit of his personal interests...

"So you would say the initial fault was entirely his. Would Tarvek say the same?"

Gil crossed his arms despite himself. "If he doesn't, he's lying."

"Hm. And ever since then, the two of you have been sniping and letting your wolves and siblings at each other."

"Mmm."

She stared absently at the table for a handful of seconds, eyebrows knit, and then nodded decisively. "I'll talk to him."

Gil just felt tired, suddenly, defensiveness and resentment deflating like a bad soufflé. "You don't need to sort it out for us, Agatha. It's fine. We're getting along alright nowadays, aren't we?" Sometimes Gil even forgot, for minutes at a time, that he couldn't trust him and that there were so many things he disliked about his ethics and his snottiness and his... his _him_. "Can't we just talk about cake? Classes? America?"

"Oh, yes. Lady Agatha's father and uncle were declared dead on a trip to North America," Vanamonde said delicately.

"Van!"

Gil flinched, but Agatha was -- not hurt, was _dry_ but also... _it's old, it's over, Van's just prodding at you_.

_... Does he like Tarvek better? Rooting for him? What?_

Agatha winced. _Not... quite that. He's annoyed that it's getting me stuck in the middle, is all._ "They went missing on an exploration trip when I was about ten. Heh. Maybe you can ask your sister if she could ask around."

"I'll do that," Gil promised. "If you have more information I could even forward her your letter. You might like corresponding with her, she's -- well."

Agatha arched an eyebrow. "She's? ... Like you?"

Gil couldn't help snorting. "Not that I've noticed, but people still manage to tell us so." He grinned then. "She's really cheerful and frank-spoken, and also she does escrima and our mother's dual swords battle-art, which is by the way _terrifying_ , and she's afraid of basically nothing at all. Actually she reminds me a bit of you if you didn't have to care about proper society and you hated books."

"Hated _books_?" Agatha said, eyes narrow in mock offense. "Why, that is nothing like me at all!"

Vanamonde chuckled indulgently.

"She does sound very interesting," Violetta said, looking a bit envious.

Agatha patted her hand; Gil had a passing thought about how _nice,_ how _good_ Agatha was -- a duchess being friends with a servant girl, and the pack bond between their wolves might be a bridge between them but Gil had seen just so many noble-born wolfbrothers who clung to their human hierarchies and even infected their wolves with snotty contempt for good people who should have been their peers. Not in his father's pack -- Baron Klaus was in the thick of things being frank and practical with everybody else no matter what -- but other packs, some with beasts of Wulfenbach stock even. He was glad Agatha was Agatha.

"She really does," Agatha said, agreeing with Violetta. "Are you sure she won't mind having to write to me?"

"She'll probably love you," Gil said philosophically. "The two of you can bond about rolling your eyes at me."

\--

_To my Good Friend, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, care of Madame Lafitte in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris_

_I will presume to share my hope that this missive finds you in good health and not Extremely busy, as I shouldn't hope to find you merely Mildly busy, for how else would you have Failed to call upon your Faithful friend Colette for so many months!_

_But I know very well that a certain Duchess of your Acquaintance needed your friendship and guidance in this unfamiliar town of Paris very much, and it has been, I will suppose, a long time since you have needed Mine not to get lost on the wrong bank of the Seine, so I shan't be too cross with you. Only I must insist, dear, that we contrive Some way to introduce her to me and some Friends post-haste. I am sure you have been doing your rough and manly best but the poor Lady has been enduring the lack of softer companionship for Far too long as it is._

_Not wanting to force upon her (and you, you boorish creature) another ball and the company of so many Hopefuls so soon, I have been thinking to set up an afternoon's walk at the parc Montsouris with university-aged Friends. I was thinking so far of Her Highness Larana Chroma, my personal Friend Lady Xerxsephnia, and two good Friends of Princess Larana whom you might have met as the younger of them is in his first Year of attending your School. Their names are Jiminez and Aldin Hoffman, of African and British origin, and they are Pack-born, though as of yet neither of them has received the great blessing of a wolf Bond. I will dare hope this creates a natural topic of conversation amongst the four of you._

_You are of course very welcome to add a few acquaintances of your own to the group so Lady Agatha does not feel too Besieged._

_Let us set a date before this gentle Autumn turns at last to cold winds and endless rains and the trees are entirely de-leaf'd. Therefore, one of the two Saturdays left before the end of the month seems a prudent choice._

_I look forward to making sure of your continued Survivance with my own doubtful eyes Soon._

_Yours in Friendship Eternal,_

_Colette Voltaire_

\--

There was absolutely no game worth the name in the Parc Montsouris. None. Gil and Bangladesh agreed on that point. It was close to several gendarmeries and fire brigades; police and rescue wolves had hunted rabbit and carp and pigeon to extinction maybe a month at best after the parc opened, a few years ago. Wary squirrels and crows might be seen, but rarely got caught -- or there were the swans, which not even Bang was fool enough to bother.

There would be a high chance of wolf encounters in the afternoon, so that Saturday morning before he went anywhere near the park he put on his good boots and his hardy pants and went at a lope through the Paris streets.

The sun was still barely thinking about rising. His sister wolf ranged ahead (and behind, and through people's open shops) and he did his best to lose through her senses all those pointless, unwanted thoughts. To keep the critical human eye on her actions, but stay in the present with her, with the smells rising from the bakery and the bulldogs barking from behind closed doors and the roosters warbling here and there from various courtyards.

It wasn't as easy as doing it with a whole pack. Not even as easy as doing it with Jenka, whose easy unconcern and cold calculations married well with Bang's constant, unsettling bloodlust. It was... something to concentrate on.

They ran and walked and trotted and slid down ramps in a wide arc around the park, through stinky backstreets and meat deliveries, and once through unsavory racketeers having a tiff about their respective pickpocketing areas.

 _Love this town_ , Bang would share absently every time she spotted a rat or terrified a petty thief into dropping his knife. _Love this town,_ Gil would echo back, feeling pangs of rueful love toward her alongside it.

Wulfenbach's grassy fields and forests, its cascading slopes, he missed, but there was just as much running to do in this sprawling capital, and a lot -- a _lot_ \-- more books to read and people to meet on the way. And that Bangladesh would enjoy it just as much as he did -- would agree with him, would feel that no matter what his father and his birth pack may think, this forest of buildings and roads _was_ proper territory for wolf and wolfbrother to live...

_Spooked horse! (glee glee make it go faster???)_

Gil took off after the horse and its carriage, sighing to hide his guilty laugh. He was pretty sure the placid-looking animal had spooked because it'd smelled her. _Cut **off** the horse do not **bite** the horse go!_

_Blah blah boring (okay fine if you insist.) (a **little** nip?)_

Bang veered right, into a backstreet; there was a crossroad coming up, there would be other carts. The horse shied briefly, almost rushed straight into one of those newfangled trams, and then Bang was in front of it, was hopping at its blinkered head, making it veer. The cart it was pulling rose on one wheel --

Gil jumped, caught the back plank, swung himself into the back as it landed back on two wheels with a crashing noise, and then spent a few harried seconds crawling across potato sacks until he could get to the front.

It took Bang hanging half of her weight by the maw from the reins before the horse was fully stopped.

 _That got me hungry!_ she said as Gil turned the horse around, eyeing its quivering hindquarters with open speculation.

 _No eating the horse. You'd have to pull the cart._ He couldn't help but grin. _I'll buy you a steak._

The owner came running and panting; Gil got the cart to slow down enough for him to climb in, handed over the reins with a grin. "Well, that was a bit too much sport for so early in the morning. Are you alright, my good man?"

"Thank you -- thank you -- oh god. Hff. Thank you _so_ much."

 _Lies_ , Bangladesh was thinking at Gil. _You need to run a lot more yet._ She sent him images of bumbling cubs, hunting butterflies until they fell asleep in a heap right where they were.

She, of course, while in perfect health, would have been totally fine not running at all. It was the chase that was fun, not the paws getting worn out. She hadn't even gotten to bite a little!

 _It's not the horse's fault you scared him,_ Gil thought sternly at her. He gave the man a handshake and then slipped off the cart before he could wrap his mind around the fact that Gil and Bangladesh had fixed a situation they had also caused.

_... If we find **thieving** people, and it's their fault (You are so unreasonable but I'm trying, see?) I can bite them then?_

"No!" Gil said out loud, sternly. "No people, you'll get yourself shot down as a feral. Now let's find you a butcher's shop or something."

( _We don't suit well,_ he thought in the back of his mind, where he was almost sure she didn't know -- but really, who _would_ Bangladesh suit, apart from perhaps a murderous villain or a cut-throat highwayman?)

It was around eleven in the morning when Bangladesh finally planted her feet and said she was going nowhere unless it was home, or he carried her to it. She only climbed back to her feet after he crouched next to her and made to pull her across his shoulders. He'd carried livestock that way back home; she wasn't much heavier than a three-months-old calf. He knew he could do it.

 _I will bite you,_ she grumbled, and then went ahead and nipped his shoulder good and proper, giving him another bruise for his collection. When they got home she slept all through lunch, spread out on the spotted jungle-beast fur rug his mother had sent last year. Gil ate on the coffee table like a heathen, so he could dig bare toes into her piebald fur.

\--

"Say, my good man, is your sister quite alright?"

Gil ruffled the hair at the back of his neck with his free hand, glanced at Agatha and Anevka to check if they were paying attention. Van couldn't attend but Agatha had borrowed Oggie to keep Jenka company and they were rambling about in the grass. Meanwhile Bangladesh was dragging her feet at Gil's side, her shoulder pressed to his thigh for balance, grumbling nonstop in the back of his mind. He had, um, _maybe_ overdone it this morning.

"I quite agree," Tarvek muttered under his breath from a couple paces away, "she hasn't bitten me yet."

"She's _fine_ ," Gil bit out, and then winced over his shoulder at Jiminez Hoffman, who he wasn't even sure had heard Tarvek. "I took her running this morning to be sure... Uh. She doesn't have a local pack, you see, and when she meets stranger wolves she can be a little... Over-enthusiastic?"

Hoffman Junior's expression cleared and he gave Gil a relieved grin. "Oh, I see. A friendly one? Most of the wolves I know are pretty reserved with strangers."

Tarvek didn't snort this time -- too ill-bred, Gil supposed -- but his lips pinched pointedly. Hoffman Senior -- Aldin -- glanced behind Colette's back to check on Jiminez. Gil smiled on reflex, hoping he didn't look awkward.

"I'm so very glad she isn't sick," Lady Xerxsephnia said solicitously, leaning forward a little. "She's such a vigorous-looking beast usually."

 _Little-knives,_ was the impression Gil got back from Bang as she picked up Xerxsephnia's words from his mind, along with approving amusement. Gil's smile strained a little. Her eyes were a wintery blue to Tarvek's slate gray, but he didn't even need the cue of her red hair or Bang's odd recognition to be wary. Something about her felt a little too intent.

Also, Anevka had watched her stepping out of her carriage and smiled like she was looking forward to a spot of bloodsport to brighten her afternoon. So.

"Truly, Gil should have introduced us ages ago," Colette was telling Agatha warmly as they walked side by side at the center-front of the pack. "Shame on him that he didn't."

Gil leaned forward to see Colette past Anevka and Agatha and rolled his eyes pointedly at her. "Shame on _you_ , you've been too busy to even talk to me at the last three parties. I'm feeling very neglected."

Colette pinched her lips like she didn't want to smile. "Gil, you came just to say you did and spent an hour each talking with the youngest wolfbrothers you could find about their new cubs before cutting out. It usually takes me longer than that to disentangle myself from all my obligations, you know."

"... Well, fair enough."

Agatha sneaked him a glance Gil couldn't read, green eyes thoughtful edging on ... he wasn't sure, calculating or maybe even wary. "You two seem pretty close...?"

"Oh, yes," Colette replied in a vaguely put-upon tone, though her dark eyes glittered. "He's the brother I never asked for. Though I didn't ask for the rest of them either -- ah, my father is on his seventh spouse, and they've all been very... prolific. The _cousin_ I never asked for? Let's go with that. We met at my débutante ball, which was frankly a catastrophe."

Xerxsephnia sighed with a touch of sarcasm, a hand theatrically on her heart but her mouth curled in a more sincere smile. "It sounded so interesting the way you told it. Dashing, with a touch of drama."

"Some very brave Count-to-be of twenty cornered her about some bit of political influence her father hadn't handed over to his, and he felt slighted about it. Being _about to inherit_ , you see -- from what I understood of his ranting," Gil explained to Agatha.

" _Oh_ , yes, the solution was obviously to pressure the sixteen-year old débutante so she could... what _did_ he think you could do?" One eyebrow quirked in despairing disbelief, Agatha looked askance at Colette, who chuckled.

"I have no idea. Pout and beg Papa for a tiny-bitty-cutesy spot on the town council?"

"That does sound bothersome," Anevka said silkily. "So pray tell, where does the... _touch of drama_ come in?"

"Oh, yes," the younger of the Hoffmans said, looking hopeful. "Aldin never wanted to say!" The eldest was already oh-so-slightly wincing. He'd been there? Well. Damn.

Gil didn't even want to _look_ at Tarvek. He cleared his throat, batted an imaginary bit of lint off his waistcoat. "I, uh, might have punched him a little."

Colette tittered at him, eyes fond. "A little indeed!"

"Then he tried to duel me in the gardens, but Colette's father was nearby and would have had him thrown in jail in a hot second, so he chickened out, and then he said he would, you know, make me _regret striking a count_ \-- I think he forgot he wasn't one yet."

"Is _that_ all he forgot?" Tarvek said, pointed but quiet, like he despaired of Gil a little. Gil glared at him.

"I was there as _my father's envoy_ , so _yes_ , that's all he forgot."

Princess Larana opened her mouth for the first time since Gil had been introduced to her, pale cheeks reddening at the attention turned to her. "But didn't he try to -- later, you know...?"

"Cause trouble?" Gil asked, turning his back to Tarvek resolutely so he could grin encouragingly at her. "Oh, he _thought_ about it." He pointed down at his sister wolf, who looked up at Larana and lolled her tongue a smugly improbable number of inches out past her teeth. "I don't have the _faintest_ idea why he changed his mind!"

Larana pressed a hand to her mouth to hide a laugh. Heh. Gil leaned in conspiratorially.

"I figured out later that our actions actually saved him from Colette, so really he should probably be thankful to Bangladesh for dragging him out of there by his pants bottoms. And um, maybe his actual bottom a bit. Colette would have devoured him alive."

"Gilgamesh Bangladeshbrother, you're a vile liar, I would _never_. I have not the faintest idea where he'd been." For someone who'd had to deal with the ruffled feathers and other social fallout, Colette still sounded oddly fond about it.

"And _then_ Colette tripped him into the fountain."

"Oh, mon cher," she lied, "I'm telling you, it was a complete accident."

Tarvek was sighing to the heavens; Anevka looked supremely entertained; Agatha... amused, too, but something else he couldn't read.

 _(cake-coffee-engine grease) Agatha?_ he nudged through the pack sense, a little worried suddenly at the thought that Agatha might decide not to like Colette, something he hadn't expected even a little bit. _Are you alright? (she's nice/want you two to get along/aren't you?)_

_You're close._

Gil blinked. _Some? Don't see her much, but fun/freedom/trust. I know her secret,_ he added without thought, and then pushed down the end of that memory before it could come through.

He couldn't help glancing at Lady Xerxsephnia, as if she could have overheard, but of course she wasn't wolf-bonded--

He caught Xerxsephnia watching him back. Um.

Agatha was still mind-frowning in the bond. _(More information!)_ warred with _(cannot ask,)_ so the effect was just a vague _... Secret?_

_Found out on accident/didn't tell so she trusts me now, but we don't visit much?_

"Well, that sounds like an exciting evening," was the only thing she said out loud. "My first official ball was also..."

" _Quite_ awkward," Tarvek interrupted, making Gil blink. That... hadn't been as smooth as usual. Huh. "If nothing to the degree of," he shuddered, for effect, "having to cause a _public scandal_. I'm afraid one of our cousins made a bit of a nuisance of himself. Understandable," he added, stealing Agatha's hand for a quick air kiss to her knuckles, "as Lady Agatha _is_ remarkable, but still much too forward of him."

Anevka wasn't doing anything so gauche as smirking, but... Yeah, she was smirking inside, Gil could tell. And Xerxsephnia's expression could probably be called a smile, but an odd, rueful one.

"My brother has always been a bit of a bull in a China shop, I'm afraid. Permit me to present my sympathy."

"Oh dear." Colette, eyes sharp, drew the group to pause in their walk, to all turn face to face. The Hoffman brothers looked confused, and Princess Larana was being quiet and shy enough to be hard to read, but the rest...

Oh dear in _deed_.

_Agatha?_

"... _Martellus_ von _Blitzengaard_ is your _brother_ ," Agatha said in a slow, measured tone, staring at Xerxsephnia straight on. Oggie and Jenka stopped in their tracks on the middle of the grass to stare as well, despite being more than twenty paces away, which was a bit alarming.

Xerxsephnia gave a polite wince. "Older brother, yes. I cannot apologize for his actions in his stead, as I was not present to influence them, but I _will_ apologize for my own failure to instill some restraint and politeness in him. It was dreadful behavior on his part, we are all quite aware of it."

"And he didn't write to the lady himself to apologize?" Jiminez asked, looking baffled. "Why, that's positively churlish."

"I would have burned it," Agatha said blandly.

"...Oh."

What on Earth had happened there, Gil couldn't help but wonder, shocked, remembering Agatha's matter of fact dismissal of the two idiots earlier in the refectory. What had Tarvek's cousin _done_ to get to her like that?

... What had _Tarvek_ done. Because he'd been involved, Gil could have bet his hand on it. He glanced at Tarvek, but his face was utterly unreadable, and so was Anevka's.

It had to have been -- terrible. Unthinkable. Gil reached his mind to Agatha's, but hers was wrapped like a wall around an intense purpose he could not read. The strength of her feeling, though --

_Jenka? What did he do?_

Jenka snorted at him, flicked her ear as if a bothersome fly had been on it. _(A massive, dark wolf with jaws wide open -- bites into a rock.)_ Grim amusement, dismissal. Long past; who cared. Agatha obviously still did.

"I'm afraid this bridge is quite gone by now. I should hope you have no notions of restoring it on his behalf."

Agatha's mind was all... tightly furled, intense with -- not even anger, but the clear, righteous certainty that if she saw this Martellus again and he so much as _breathed_ in her direction she was going to end him.

Not... Not _socially_ end him either.

Gil was still trying to untangle it, tottering at the edge of a chasm in his knowledge of her that he could _feel_ but not _measure_ , when Xerxsephnia huffed. "Oh no, pray don't worry. He made his bed. I wouldn't expect otherwise."

Agatha's eyes stayed narrowed behind her spectacles, but more in thought than in hostility. "... Well."

"I would much rather be friends," Xerxsephnia added, holding out both hands, and looked hopeful, more honest than any from her family usually did. Agatha considered her for another second, then glanced at Anevka (not Tarvek, Gil was surprised.) Anevka nodded slowly, tapping her fan to her chin in consideration.

"I would believe her," Anevka said in her smoky, amused voice. "With the usual caveats."

 _The **redheaded** caveats? _Gil overheard from Agatha, but out loud she only nodded and reached back to squeeze Xerxsephnia's hands.

"Very well. Let's... become acquainted."

If Xerxsephnia turned on her too, the Blitzengaard branch of the ancient Valois family tree was going to end up well-pruned. Gil bit his lip, caught between amusement-pride and dismay, a slowly growing sense of loss.

No wonder she liked, _trusted_ Tarvek so much. They hadn't become friends by talking of nothing, airy pleasantries and not-opposed politics. They had a secret -- they had a common enemy. They were _allies_.

Meanwhile here he was, jogging at her heels with his puppy crush -- amusing and bumbling-cute, and he hoped at least a _little_ attractive, but little more than that. It was enough to make him want to break something.

 _... Bite?_ Bangladesh asked him, but dubious, like she could tell her go-to solution really wouldn't work this time around.

 _It's fine,_ he tried to tell her, but the fact was -- the only edge he had over Tarvek was that he had a wolf for Agatha and Jenka to eventually become pack with, and Tarvek didn't.

(Instead Tarvek had become pack on his own merit, with no mind-melding involved.)

\--

He followed when the group started walking again, but it was hard to shake the dark cloud gathering over his head. He made smiles and nodded when people addressed him, and tried to concentrate on the paysage -- the gardens were really nicely done. They left the rose gardens and then the little lake spread out to their right, with a bridge and an island in the distance. There were some swans, some ducks watching the wolves frolicking on the grass with wary side-glances. There were... Roses and crocuses and other flowers he knew nothing about and didn't care much for...

There were just as many wolves and their brothers ambling around as he had expected, and maybe even a little more; Gil was glad that Bang was still too tired to do more than watch wistfully from afar. Oggie had made friends with a portly dog wolf with grayish-brown, moldy-looking fur and striking gold eyes, and kept dancing around him in the grass as they both trailed an indifferent Jenka. They bounded past a spectacular golden-furred little Valois bitch wolf on the bridge, edged toward...

"Oh, look, cubs!"

"They're pretty young for this time of the year," Jiminez pointed out to Larana, smiling encouragingly. The cubs were all the way on the other side of the lake, playing at the edge of the water.

"Maybe we should go and meet them?" she offered. "I mean, I know that you..."

Jiminez blinked in confusion; his older brother sighed. "Thank you, Larana, but it'd be better for us to bond in-pack anyway, if it ever happens. It would be hard to ever leave Paris if the cub's only family was staying here, and tempting as the town is we've got to go home some day."

"Maybe they're also just visiting," Gil pointed out, and forced himself to engage Jiminez in conversation to determine the mother's main line and origin from how little they could see of her across the lake -- Valois, Braganza? Definitely not Heterodyne, and she was too stocky for a Stuart --

"Well, _you're_ not planning on leaving Paris anytime soon," Tarvek was muttering -- at the back of the group, where no one else was paying attention to him save for Bangladesh's ears, always turned his way for a chance at mayhem and harrying. Gil abruptly redirected his attention to her senses.

He barely had time to understand what Bang told him of Anevka's scent -- irritated-aggressive, biting-ready -- and then someone bumped his side and he was thoroughly distracted. Lady Xerxsephnia had inserted her hand under his elbow and was now smiling up at him, guileless.

"We haven't had a chance to talk yet! I was so very glad when Colette mentioned you were also invited, I've admired your sister-wolf for years. She's so--"

Gil braced himself for another backhanded compliment, or some utter lie like "charming" or "elegant".

"Determined," Xerxsephnia said instead. "Uncowed? My brother is the packmaster on our lands so I've met plenty, but I've never met a wolf so likely to go her own way."

"She's a vicious brute with no sense of hierarchy," Gil corrected with open, challenging lack of apology. Bangladesh lolled her tongue at him and wagged her tail in approval at the girl. Gil couldn't tell if Xerxsephnia had interfered deliberately, but if she had then what cabal was she covering up for her cousins?

Xerxsephnia snorted, not very genteel at all. Huh. "Well, yes, but that's still a type of strength. You could probably start a very strong war-oriented line with her. You know a great many wolves only find the willpower to stand against an attacker when they're defending their den or their cubs, but a temperament like hers could be an incredible asset if we were not at peace."

Gil shook his head in mild horror. "That is a very interesting theory that I am quite happy to never think about _ever again_. I'm pretty sure if Bang ever had cubs she would eat them. But it's a moot point, because her season only makes her more hostile anyway."

Xerxsephnia stared at Gil with unexpected intensity for a second, and then at Bangladesh, who yawned casually with all teeth out. "...Are you telling me she's a maiden wolf?"

Gil flushed all at once. Oh god. He was talking about _wolf heats_ with a noble-born débutante. No, she wasn't _that_ young, but--

But if her brother was Packmaster there was _no way_ Xerxsephnia didn't know that bonded as they were she was also talking about _Gil's own sex life_. "Madame," he said stiffly, "I wouldn't know! I did not bond her as a cub, I'm certain she had a life before becoming my sister and it is not my place to pry."

She was _smiling_ , not shocked at all. "Oh, I assure you I didn't mean--"

"Seffie, what are you telling that poor man?"

 _Catching flies_ , Bang told him, and Gil snapped his mouth closed. He wanted to defend himself, even though Tarvek hadn't even said anything to him. Was it implied? It was probably implied.

"Oh, but nothing untoward, cousin!" she was protesting demurely.

"Naturally, cousin, but I doubt your esteemed brother would like you at the arm of such a total lout--"

"Hey!"

"--And as we know, I care _very much_ about what your esteemed brother would want." Tarvek smiled at Xerxsephnia, mouth closed. Gil felt -- odd. Like maybe _he_ ought to switch his hand to Tarvek's elbow. Hide behind him. Something.

_Gil? Are you alright? (distress/confusion?)_

Agh. _I'm fine sorry. Lady Xerxsephnia is (forward!) less demure than she looks. ("Is Bangladesh a maiden wolf" agh no joking she is, the only lust she knows is her lust for murder!)_

Bang echoed something that a human would have verbalised as 'that's damned right!' under Gil's nervous outburst. Agatha replied nothing save an echoing, forceful absence for a couple of seconds, and Gil flushed harder, mortified.

 _She says, that'll make this winter interesting_ , Oggie transmitted with an edge of confusion, and was immediately set upon by Jenka, all teeth out. Gil stared at the back of Agatha's head but could see nothing but the shell of a rather scarlet ear.

And then Tarvek drove a pointy elbow into his side. Gil flinched, sidestepped onto Bang and almost tripped over her back. He would have fallen if the same traitorous hand hadn't grabbed him back by the sleeve.

"What the hell was that for!?"

" _Language_ , please."

"Oh, I'll language your please--"

Rgh. Ugh. Hmph. Gil stuffed his clenched fists back into his pockets and glared at the snotty jerk who... had inserted himself between Gil and his cousin, alright, _thanks very much_ but. Ugh. Gil shoved him in the shoulder -- not very hard since he didn't want him to land on Xerxsephnia -- and followed grumpily.

"Truly I don't understand how you can be so crass in mixed company," Tarvek said, eyes heavenwards in a pious way that made Gil tempted to step back and allow his wolf to move between them.

_Ooooh yes. A little nibble?_

_... That'd be bad. (Tempted, though.)_

Bang lolled her tongue, eyes gleaming. Tarvek gave her a wary look.

"Wulfenbach, if you even _think_ about--"

"Yeees?" Gil grinned innocently. "About?"

But there was an odd look on Tarvek's face, distracted, brows knit. Gil frowned. How dare he start in on banter and snappy comebacks and then just _check out in the middle_?

Tarvek stopped walking, looked behind him; Gil, Anevka and Xerxsephnia stopped too, the rest of the group continuing on without them. The little golden Valois bitch wolf Gil had noticed on the bridge earlier was approaching them, tail tip wagging with shy interest.

Beside him Bangladesh was rock-still, head low, stare intent; Gil slipped his fingers into her collar by reflex, still trying to -- wait, wait, this couldn't be...

'No wolf has ever _liked_ you,' he'd said once to Tarvek -- eleven, twelve? -- with his arm tight around Higgs's solid neck, their bond still so new, so bubbly-right, Gil so incredulously happy and all teeth out to keep it safe. Because Tarvek twisted everything, broke and betrayed, and didn't deserve to _keep_ the dreams and plays of brave knights and their four-legged brothers in arms and fangs. 'They love your sister, but they won't even _sniff_ you.' Vicious, guilty cruelty, spoken like an oracle. 'They _never will_.'

The little golden bitch was gorgeous. And shy, almost coy, but her eyes wouldn't leave Tarvek's face, and he'd seen it before, this sudden interest. He knew where it went.

He could almost smell the edges of her Name as she pressed it onto Tarvek's mind, a burst of flowers and lady's perfume, something precious and cultured...

"Oh, how grand," Jiminez said from several steps away, having noticed, and Agatha --

" _What the--_ " _**Hell?!**_

Gil blinked, glanced back at her by reflex. That wasn't mere surprise, that was shock, that was --

Bangladesh almost tore his shoulder out of its socket when she lunged.

"Bangladesh, _no!_ " Gil snarled, throwing his whole weight onto her flank to try to topple her to the ground, and grappled with her back legs as she tried to eel out from under him. The strength of her fury left his mind reeling, but he tightened his grasp and heaved her hindquarters up and off the ground so she couldn't jump. The golden wolf had danced back several feet, but no farther. "Tarvek, tell her to go!"

Tarvek didn't respond. Agatha was there suddenly, was grabbing at his arm -- and Jenka and Oggie and their new, stocky friend were rushing back all... _teeth out_ \-- what the hell?!

Bang hunched and then snaked her body violently, making Gil stumble, and then easygoing Oggie was jumping at the golden wolf, blond fur up in a wave along his back. Jenka knocked into Gil's legs pushing through the group to help; Gil lost his grip on Bangladesh.

"Agatha!" he yelled as he ran at the knot of snapping wolves. "Agatha, tell them to stand down!"

_How did-- (no it's -- why -- wrong, stop) (a wolf snarling at a snake--)_

_Do **something!**_

He threw himself into the melee, hands first, felt fangs glance off his forearm -- cotton tore. Caught an ear, twisted hard, pulled -- Jenka, pulling her strike to pinch hard at his waist and not bite through -- caught a tail, kicked at Oggie's rump, and Bangladesh was the worst, was --

_(Kill it kill it kill it!)_

He punched down onto her snout and caught the golden bitch by the scruff, heaved up -- she was light, two thirds of Bang's weight or less, and he caught her bodily under the ribs and lifted.

 _(Attack?!) (No, pack?) (No! Mine!)_ The wolves danced around him, feinting to bite at the golden bitch's trailing legs; Gil kicked blind at the pack before him and stumbled, then turned tail and started a plodding rush to the island and the bridge a few feet off the path. Agatha's two wolves and the stray they'd picked up immediately wanted to jump on his back -- he could feel their intent like hard shoves against his mind, but Bangladesh was in between them now and she wouldn't let them, furious but not so far gone she would have let them attack him.

He thundered up the narrow bridge, the wolves fighting each other to get in first after him. The bitch in his arms was still kicking and twisting, broadcasting her alarm and fear, and he was sure if he'd caught her higher toward the withers and his head had been less tucked into his shoulders that she would have bitten a chunk out of his face out of nothing but panic.

He reached the apex of the bridge and -- the island had too many trees, no space for a man to fight but plenty for wolves, and he'd sealed almost all her exits, so he just twisted to the side and toppled her backwards over the guardrail.

Bangladesh was bearing him down to the ground in the very next second, snarling. Oggie went up on his back feet like he was about to hop in the water after the golden wolf; Jenka and the stocky one immediately tried to back off the bridge, getting in each other's way before they managed to rush back out and onto the bank.

"Oof. Go!" he called out. "Swim away!"

He heard splashing. Out on the grass people were calling to each other, yelling, making a good and proper commotion. It didn't sound as if Jenka and the rest were following into the water. Sighing out his battle tension, he relaxed onto the bridge planks and shoved grumpily at Bang's muzzle. She was standing half on him, sniffing frenzied at his chest and making enraged noises.

"Bang, I'm _okay_ \--" _Bang. Sister._ He thought about the meaty scent of hot blood and entrails spilling on the floor that was her name until she stilled long enough to meet his eyes. Hers were still hard as ice, as if she barely knew him. _Love you. Safe now. Peace?_

 _You should have let me kill it_ , she said with cold, depthless rage. There was no hint of love of mayhem or wistful thoughts of _fun_ in her head. Gil sank his fingers in her neck fur, petted to try to settle her down, his mind racing.

Bangladesh had seen people bond before, people from home and strangers both. Bangladesh had seen his father, the man she'd wanted as hers, bond to Boris of all wolves, and sure, she'd tried to kill Boris too, entirely committed to his death -- but still not half as _hostilely_.

He kept petting her neck around the links of her collar, trying to make his mind and his fingers as soothing as he knew how. _She's gone now. You drove her off. Peace._

Why wouldn't she want Tarvek to -- was she that obsessed with him? Sometimes, dogs and wolves would -- would get like that over a favored _toy_ , and Tarvek had been complaining so much about her sneak attacks that Gil had tuned him out, but.

"Gil!" Agatha called out from the bank. "Gil, are you alright?!"

Gil waved a hand up past Bang's shoulder, and tried to sit up. Oof. Now he felt the strained muscles from that stunt. Even a small wolf was still really heavy, and -- oh, he'd been bitten in more places than he'd thought. Nothing that really bled much, but he was going to be bruised for a while.

He caught the guardrail, pulled himself back up. His sleeve was shredded and he had loose fur and specks of wolf blood on his clothes here and there. Ugh. He scanned the lake for the golden bitch wolf, found her still paddling away. Jenka had started going around the lake, but was coming back, ears folded back and looking really cross. The other wolves were crowding around the bench they'd gotten Tarvek to sit on. Everyone else was standing, darting nervous looks at the park around them.

Anevka had a hand near her sleeve and Gil was suddenly, blindingly certain she had a blade hidden there and she would be using it next if pushed.

Bang nipped his hand again as he made his way off the bridge, then followed, pacing around him in grumpy, exhausted-but-determined loops.

"Everyone okay?" Gil called out. "...Tarvek?"

Agatha was standing right by him, her skirts frothing against his leg, a hand on his shoulder, and she looked as intense as Jenka did. Her green eyes flicked up and down Gil's body, a quick pulse of _intent_ reaching toward his mind and checking on his body sensations from the inside, without asking.

"I'm fine," Gil told her helplessly. "Couple nips. I've had worse." Tarvek still looked stunned, like a man who'd gotten socked in the head good and proper. He blinked up at Gil, eyes a little too wide, too vague -- for a second Gil felt vertigo, distant -- and then forced a smile that immediately had Gil's back up.

It was a bad attempt at _sincere_. Since when did they even do sincere?! Gil gritted his teeth. Tarvek blinked and ducked his head like he was embarrassed, smiled at Jenka next, who had pushed her sooty muzzle in his face and was making grumpy noises.

"What a positively dazzling little sun that wolf was. Permit me to rest my eyes on your moonlike beauty, my lady."

Jiminez laughed nervously. Everyone looked shaken -- Colette looked calculating, Agatha looked murderous.

Xerxsephnia looked...

"Was she part of your brother's pack?" Gil asked her point blank, eyes narrowing. "Because that sure as _hell_ looked like a grudge."

"Swearing," Jiminez said automatically. "Ladies--"

Agatha hissed between her teeth. " _Monsieur_ Hoffman, in this situation he can swear as much as he _damn well wants_." She turned to stare at Xerxsephnia, who seemed to pale even though her skin was already white as porcelain.

"I don't -- she's not part of the lines my brother breeds, I'm quite sure. He breeds the stockier types, you know? Knights and Rooks, they're war beasts, nowhere near this delicate."

"... I can confirm that I didn't see a wolf with her conformation last time," Agatha said reluctantly.

But at the moment Gil knew that he and Agatha were thinking the exact same thing -- Xerxsephnia knew _something_.

Anevka's eyes were snake-cold like she had thought it five minutes ago, and she was one way or another going to find out what it was very soon.

Silence enveloped the group for a trailing, awkward moment.

"We're leaving," Agatha told them brusquely, not asking in the least.

"Yes," Colette agreed slowly, "I think it's for the best. Tarvek, can you walk?"

"Oh -- yes, certainly. It was just a bout of dizziness," he lied, smiling a close-mouthed smile, and sneaked Agatha a speaking look. A partners-in-crime look, a look that said, let's not talk it out more around these outsiders, let's not let me show weakness before anyone but you.

So Gil didn't push. He let Jiminez and Aldin offer their shoulders, and he let the group move before him so he could see it whole -- rearguard -- and he said not another word about any of it, besides accepting congratulations from Jiminez and Larana for his 'ox-like strength' and 'quick reaction'. He waited until Tarvek's carriage took him and his sister back, and until Agatha had gone as well, and then he and Bangladesh refused Colette's offer of a carriage and limped home in brooding silence.

He didn't care much at all that it was less the blood spots and the torn sleeve and the wolf than the dark look on his face that made people step out of his way.

\--

_Father,_

_I need to know Everything you know about the Valois lines that they don't show around much._

_Gilgamesh Bangladeshbrother Wulfenbach_


	4. Chapter 4

"But the hyperbolic cosine doesn't make _sense_ that way--"

"The math says it does."

"Well then the math is wrong!"

"The math is _not_ wrong!" Pushed and pulled through the crowd of students pouring out of the doors, Tarvek still managed to glare imperiously over his pince-nez. Gil resisted the urge to poke it back up his nose. "I might _possibly_ accept that the formula, while otherwise sufficient, is inadequate in exceptional situations--"

"Ha!"

"--But I will not accept it _without proof._ " Tarvek glared. Gil scowled.

"I'll have your proof by tomorrow," he promised, trying not to think about the coming all-nighter. Mathematics of this level was fun, if an intense kind of fun, but there were so many things going on that he needed his wits about himself for--

"Proof of what?"

Gil and Tarvek turned around on the grass, beamed in tandem. "Agatha!"

" _Lady_ Agatha," Tarvek corrected Gil, as if he hadn't just now used her Christian name in public as well. "Please do arbitrate; in your opinion, do _feelings_ have a place in higher mathematics?"

Gil elbowed Tarvek in the ribs. "I'm _telling_ you I'm right. If you posit that the hyperbola--"

"I look forward to you providing irrefutable proof tomorrow, then. Heaven forbid you show your work in this instead of relying on some strange animal instinct for figures."

"The two of you," Agatha said, mouth stern and eyes dancing, "are ridiculous. But do tell me about the lesson."

"But you'll have nothing left to learn next term," Gil said, pretending to lament. 

Agatha's academic advisor didn't want to let her tack on higher mathematics to her course load; Gil was, he wasn't ashamed to admit, missing her and her brilliant mind quite a bit. Agatha was extremely scientifically inclined as it was -- he could see it clear as day in Engineering, and Mathematics was merely a less solid facet of it. It felt wrong for her not to be there.

He knew she would catch up fast, but it might take a year or so before she was in the same class as Gil. (And Tarvek. Gil frankly had no idea why Tarvek was even taking Higher Mathematics, in between Political Science and History of Europa and about five foreign languages, but the man was unfairly good at it.)

"Gil," Agatha was retorting pointedly, "I can _test into a higher class_ in that case, and my advisor _can't say anything about it_."

"Oh! I was a fool," Gil shot back, a hand on his heart and grinning with all his teeth. "Please, _please_ let us tutor you."

"Maybe someday," she said, eyes dancing with restrained laughter. "Or maybe I'll just steal your notes while you're not looking." Gil grinned harder.

God help him, but even despite how she was leaving him in the dark, on the sidelines of everything important, he couldn't help but hope when she smiled at him like that.

(He knew her smile was so brilliant because he had said 'us'. He'd been braced, post-park incident, for Tarvek to insinuate something bitter and unsurprised about Gil ruining his chances at a wolf bond, but the only mentions he'd made the next Monday had been related to Gil's robust constitution and propensity to back-breaking heroics, and should Tarvek perhaps carry his satchel to spare those poor sprained muscles. Which had been loaded with irony, but not... not _mean_. And Agatha -- It was so hard to keep his defenses up when Agatha was so visibly _glad_ about it, even knowing it would sour eventually.)

"Please, his notes will be useless to you, his leaps of logic are ridiculous. Who needs to write in code when you can write like Gilgamesh Wulfenbach?"

"Who needs to write in code at _all_?" Gil exclaimed. (The answer was, of course, Tarvek. Tarvek needed to write in code. Not his Mathematics notes, but the political. Gil hadn't broken it yet.)

"I understand Gil's notes rather well, actually," Agatha countered, a single golden eyebrow up.

Tarvek stared at her with flat disbelief. "My lady, you do _not_." 

Agatha smirked, eyes heavy-lidded in friendly mockery, and then gave Gil a teasingly dubious look, lips pursed. "... Admittedly sometimes it is because I have the benefit of actually being able to _read his mind_."

Gil spluttered. "Oh, come on, I'm not that bad!"

Agatha grinned, Tarvek already smirking behind his curled hand even before she replied. "You really are, but it's a good exercise in thinking laterally."

They were still all three teasing each other when they passed the front gate, and then Agatha's smile fell off her face like someone had thrown it into a jagged mountain chasm. 

Gil's back stiffened; he tore his eyes from her to check the crowd for the source of that dread kicking at his heart.

There was a blonde woman a little farther down the street, standing next to a gilded coach fancy enough that Tarvek wouldn't have turned up his nose at it. She was smiling with amused friendliness.

Gil felt a flash of paved streets under rushing paws. Bang and Maxim and Jenka -- even more legs than that. Dodging pedestrians, mouths curled into silent snarls.

His face had frozen with shock in the first second; he had to work at it not to imitate the teeth-baring sneer of his sister-wolf, to go with a neutral, polite smile instead.

Agatha's spine was stiff and her heartbeat so fast and strong across the bond he felt dizzy, like his own was going into sympathetic arrhythmia. He'd never been so strongly aware of the sensations of her body before -- toes curling as if to catch a grip, back stiff enough to ache across the shoulder blades. The whole of his/her skin hot and flushed.

"Mother," she said, voice devoid of any warmth.

Lucrezia Mongfish-Heterodyne smiled wider. "Agatha, darling! I finally catch you."

 _( **Catch** me?!)_ came through with a swell of rage somehow both incredulous and unsurprised. _(you know where I **live** \-- you know where to **write** \-- **saw** me and it was a **bother** to--) _

_Calm!_ resonated from somewhere farther in the pack mind -- not Van, though it felt analytical enough; someone from her pack that Gil hadn't yet met, that she was letting sink through herself, wrap herself into. _Calm and **ready**. You know better than to give her what she wants._

Gil smiled a little wider, firmed his stance. It was ridiculous that a single woman in her forties and her lone attendant would make them feel like he had once felt, a boy of fifteen at his sister's side and about to be set upon by all the young warriors of his mother's court. 

"Yes," Agatha finally replied, and managed the inhuman feat of sounding slightly bored. "It's a shame that we missed each other at Duke Strinbeck's ball. But the crowd _was_ hard to navigate."

(The crowd was really not.)

"Lady Lucrezia, what an unexpected pleasure to see you again," Tarvek said, advancing to brush an air kiss against her gloved hand with urbane friendliness. Agatha's mother tittered, visibly pleased -- looked at Gil.

She looked like she wasn't sure if she wanted to get him to do the same, or to pretend he wasn't there at all. Leaning toward 'not at all'. Gil smiled genially. 

"Ah, Madame, I learn your name at last!" He bowed then, and took her hand -- without asking even wordlessly, _because_ she was making no move to offer it -- and instead of touching naught but air, pressed an entirely boorish kiss on it, lips pursed and ever so slightly humid. "So odd to think we met so late, having so many acquaintances in common! Why, you were very nearly my aunt all along."

Tarvek was staring at him like he didn't know if he wanted to beat him with a shovel and bury him under an etiquette classroom or applaud, possibly while crying. Agatha's face was still neutral, but behind that there was a spark of fierce... not joy, sharper than that, but something that pulled Gil's smile tighter, made him unveil more in the way of teeth.

"Truly... Truly." Lucrezia laughed behind her hand, bell-like, lower eyelids twitching minutely. "I do wonder what that dear old Klaus had to say about me?"

"Should I have asked, madame?" Gil asked guilelessly, and gave her a charming, devil may care grin. "Since you advise it, I will make sure to enquire about all your best stories." 

"Oh, please, don't bother him for such trifles, I'll be happy to tell them to you myself." She was almost perfectly smooth about it, but Gil was unsurprised when she turned to her daughter immediately after that. "So -- Agatha darling. When were you going to let me admire your little pied-à-terre? I'm sure it's positively charming."

 _When she says 'charming',_ Agatha threw at Gil, face not changing, _you can tell she means 'pitifully small and quaint and is it in fashion to pretend to be **poor**?'_

"Well, not today, Mother. I have prior engagements. Who's your companion?"

Lucrezia looked briefly nonplussed, like she had forgotten the man was there. "Oh. This is Herr Snarlantz, an old friend and a man of science. Herr Snarlantz, my dear daughter and her... friends."

Herr Snarlantz had unfortunate teeth and long stringy hair on the sides, the top of his head bald like an egg; he dressed according to his station, which was visibly a couple of rungs lower than hers, and not with any great attention to the effects of hard use on the cloth. It was odd to see a lady of quality walking around with such a man. Then again, there was no question that he was no marriage prospect, and she was a widow at any rate...

"Lady Lucrezia is my invaluable patroness," Snarlantz said, bowing over Agatha's hand with an odd, toothy smile. "I hear you are also scientifically inclined? _Magnificent_."

 _... Creepy_ , Gil thought, and then, at Jenka, like an afterthought, _probably don't bite him_. Jenka came to a stop at the man's side, just barely behind him, and the blinkered horses flinched into their poles. 

The man _didn't_ flinch, finding her dark muzzle and wary eyes appearing under his elbow. Lucrezia's mouth twisted briefly, but then she smiled. "What a pretty little thing. Introduce us, darling." 

Jenka's upper lip twitched briefly, and then she actually wagged her tail.

"Jenka Agathassister of Mechanicsburg pack," Agatha said blandly. "Meet Lucrezia Mongfish and Herr Snarlantz. And this is Bangladesh Gilgameshsister of Wulfenbach pack," she slid on, unconcerned, like she hadn't forgotten the most relevant half of her own mother's last name, or at least like she hadn't meant to. 

Jenka offered the man a paw to shake, lolling her tongue just a tiny, charming bit.

"Oh, yes, clear Valois blood," he said, taking her paw less to shake than to stare at its toes, "what a delicate conformation--"

"Actually, she's a purebred Heterodyne, if there is such a thing."

( _Really?_ Gil asked, because he'd been wondering, and Agatha replied absently, _I have no idea. At least half for sure._ )

"Well, Heterodyne bloodlines are such a chaotic mess!" Lucrezia exclaimed. " _One_ of them had to look good due to naught but chance. How lucky that was yours!"

... Coming from the other direction, Maxim came to a stop by Agatha's hip, staring at the woman with his long vampire fangs unveiled a bit higher than usual, and tossed his finely shaped head like he had a horse mane to flick.

"And this is Maxim," Agatha said dryly. "Heterodyne."

Gil blinked guilelessly to keep from laughing.

"... Anyway. Yes, yes, charming, but how tedious for those of us not blessed with furry fascination!" Lucrezia exclaimed with a laugh, and then somehow insinuated herself on Tarvek's arm. "Aren't I right, Tarvek, my dear? I was so glad to hear my daughter was keeping such good company. Tell me how you're doing these days."

Bangladesh grumbled as she pushed right through the group to nose at Gil, hip-checking Tarvek into Agatha's mother on the way. _Ugh, perfume._

 _... Don't do that,_ Gil said, uneasy with the accidental flank-to-flank contact. Lucrezia was tittering at something Tarvek was saying, fake-peevish about Gil's wolf. It was no use telling Bangladesh not to antagonize Tarvek, though --

 _Is she stealing him?_ Bang asked with immediate interest, and then whirled around on a dime to go up on her hind legs and put both front paws on Tarvek's tailored jacket, making his knees buckle under her weight. Grinning all teeth out, she licked a stripe right across his face, spectacles included. Tarvek stumbled back, almost bringing Lucrezia down with him; Bang fell back on all fours, tail high and wagging casually. 

"- _-Wulfenbach_ ," Tarvek growled as he fished around his own pockets for a handkerchief. " _Control your noxious beast_."

Agatha rolled her lips inwards like she very strongly didn't want to say something, and Gil didn't know if it was anger or amusement underneath. 

"Aw," Gil said smarmily, leaning a bit too far into Lucrezia's personal space on his way to invading Tarvek's, "but she likes you so much!"

 _Tasty!_ Bang confirmed. Agatha cleared her throat. Okay, it was definitely amusement now.

"Anyway. We have much to do at the library before it closes, Mother, so--"

Lucrezia tittered. "Entertaining two young men, darling!"

"In the _public library_ , Mother. We have several papers to write. But do feel free to hang around, it _is_ a public place."

Gil groaned in the pack sense. _She's liable to actually come, isn't she?_

(' _Hang around' instead of 'chaperone'_ , someone else was echoing out appreciatively _, no legitimacy/authority, edge of unwanted-and-imposing, very good word choice._ )

 _Shh trust_. _(She will regain authority over me over my dead body. Wait not even! I'll have the wolves eat my corpse first -- ohh, **no** , I'll have the wolves eat **her** first--)_ "Just so long as you remember that idle chatter is prohibited there," Agatha finished in a dry, perfunctory way, "and we will be unavailable to entertain you."

_There. Oh no bored, no audience, fate worse than death._

Lucrezia was staring at her daughter, and her expression wasn't the previous charming, full-lipped 'you know you love and adore me' pouty smile. It was... Gil didn't know what it was. Like a mask had fallen and no other had been hung back on.

"... Why, you're much less shy these days. University has been good to you."

"Yes," Agatha replied, cold as a polar night, "it has been. A good day to you, Herr Snarlantz."

Jenka and Maxim snapped to attention and took positions at her sides without a word spoken, and Agatha moved down the sidewalk, a bare nod to Tarvek and to Gil himself to indicate they should follow. Tarvek bowed, Gil bobbed his head vaguely, and they went after her, Bangladesh trailing them tongue lolling.

It was three more corners turned before Agatha spoke again, grim and frustrated.

"Well, I can never stay at the public library ever again. She'll know to ambush me there if she doesn't want me talking back, and after the sidewalk didn't restrain me she's not going to risk that."

Tarvek sneaked Gil a look; Gil grimaced back; for once he was certain they were in agreement on how frustratingly ridiculous this situation was. "I'm sure we can arrange to pick up books for you between us," Tarvek said.

Agatha waved a hand shortly, without looking at either of them. "Oh, I can come in and out in strategic strikes. But studying there, now, that's well over." 

_Perimeter check/on alert?_ Jenka said, all tight focus, wound through the memory of Lucrezia's perfume.

"... Yes, thank you."

"Think we can risk it today?" Gil said wistfully. "I was looking forward to it..."

"So was I," she replied somberly. "It'll have to be the last time."

Gil followed in silence to the library, and tried not to think too hard about how, deep down, he was a little glad this had happened. The problem of Agatha's mother was nothing like the dangerous thing she and Tarvek had navigated together against Tarvek's cousin -- that secret he couldn't push for, had no right to ask about -- but it did hurt and infuriate her and here he was, welcomed to help parry it away, to make it better.

It wasn't life or death, but it was intimate and painful and he was part of it.

At the library, when Gil went hunting for references through the stacks, Tarvek and Agatha passed each other notes. When Gil came back to the table neither of them offered them to him.

\--

_To my Son and Heir, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, care of Madame Lafitte in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris_

_Am assuming terseness of your missive + knowledge enough to even ask the question means you witnessed one. DO NOT APPROACH.  DO NOT LEAVE BANGLADESH'S SIDE. Send longer report ASAP._

_Initial theory is they trespass on existing bond. Longer reply to follow._

_Your Father,_

_Klaus Wulfenbach, Baron Wulfenbach_

Gil read his father's letter in the street, right next to the concierge's lodge. His first thought was that he was sorely glad there was no earthly way for his father to know Gil had lifted the little golden bitch bodily. He could just about imagine Klaus Wulfenbach's exact heavenwards stare, begging some greater presence for a touch of surprise at his son's foolishness...

His second thought was devoid of even a touch of levity.

There were breeders of high lineage and considerable means breeding animals who could trespass on another wolf's bond.

Tarvek's family was large and many-branched, but not a one of them ranked lower than a Count. Why did they _need_ that? An ability like this only mattered if you were planning for war. 

The least damaging reason would be for reasons of internal strife... Some other branch trying to reduce Martellus' pack's efficiency in battle, for example, if what Xerxsephnia had said about her brother not breeding this type was true. A way to disrupt their clandestine deals and familial backstabbing. 

But once the wolves _existed_ , even after the squabble was won, there was no way this mystery faction would not put them to other uses.

 _War?_ Bangladesh inquired, mind full of cannon smoke and blood eagerly spilled on churned ground.

The last war to tear the continent apart had died in fits and reluctant spurts when Gil and Zeetha were still toddling around -- with some pockets of conflict resurging here and there in the following years, but...

It had lasted so long, and there was still so much resentment.

It wasn't something they could openly talk about in class. _Let's go see Agatha and Jenka,_ Gil told Bangladesh, stuffing the letter down his front pocket.

When they reached Agatha's building, though, Bang stopped in the middle of a cheerful mind-call full of bear stink and accompanying spilled entrails, and Gil almost folded in two over her roadblock of a rump.

 _Not here_ , she told him, and sniffed at the bottom of the door grumpily. _Sheep and churned mud?_ she pushed out with considerably less enthusiasm, head craned to stare upwards. A second later Oggie's blond head popped a windowpane open with enthusiasm, and -- wasn't that Agatha's apartment? Huh.

" _Ognian, that's **glass!**_ "

Gil cleared his throat and smiled genially when Vanamonde's just-as-blonde head peered through over his wolf's ears. 

"Oh. Good morning. Lady Agatha isn't here."

"Yeah, I, uh. Figured that out. Can you tell me where she is?"

Vanamonde arched an eyebrow pointedly, said nothing. Gil's face heated up a little. The letter had felt so urgent a second ago, but from the outside it did look a bit... Um.

"I got a letter from my father and I think she'd want to know." He glanced around, but at ten on a Sunday morning everyone was either at church, at the market, or still home. "It's about the she-wolf at the park, if she's told you about it?"

"She did." Vanamonde gave an elegant shrug of his shoulders. "But she's also busy."

"I'm not saying I want to _interrupt_ , I just want to find her when she's done!" Gil replied with an edge of frustration he couldn't quite tamp down. Vanamonde only arched his eyebrow again. 

"I suggest you take it to Prince Tarvek. As I understand it, this concerns his family directly. He will probably find it of some interest."

Gil recoiled mentally from the thought. Giving Tarvek more, perhaps crucial intelligence for him to play his games, and silkily fail to offer anything in return but empty words of minimizing thanks? No. He did want Tarvek's take on it -- it was his stupid family, he had to have some insight to offer -- but showing up at his place like they were fr-- _allies_ , who _trusted_ each other? At least when Agatha was around, he might be forced to share his conclusions, if only by politeness.

(Unless Agatha also...)

(If Agatha said "thank you for bringing this to me" and then shut him out, at least Gil would know for sure where he stood.)

Bang snorted, nipped at his waist. _Sheep-and-mud, where's cake-and-coffee-and-engine-grease/bear-over-a-kill?_

Oggie tilted his head carelessly, and dropped the map of the town around her in Gil and Bang's heads.

"--Hey, that's Colette's! Why didn't you say so, it's not like Colette minds me crashing her friend dates." He made himself wave a goodbye over his shoulder, already turning away. "Good day, thanks for the help!"

" _No_ \-- agh." 

Pure stubbornness propelled Gil through the streets toward Colette's arrondissement, but he couldn't help but feel odd about it, like maybe Vanamonde had been right and it wasn't so urgent he could barge in on ladies. Everyone knew him at Colette's home, from her father down to the newest servants, and considering how she was about politicking and keeping track of troublemakers he was positive she would be _really interested_ in reading his letter, but... 

_("Initial theory is they trespass on existing bond.")_

It wasn't _urgent_ , no, Paris wasn't under attack, but he couldn't keep from shuddering.

 _Why do you think the she-wolf wanted Tarvek?_ he asked Bang as they went at a long lope through the next, slightly posher neighborhood. _Do they also bond normally?_

Bangladesh's upper lip curled. _Don't know, don't care. If I kill it it won't bond at all._

Gil grimaced. He could tell from the steel-steady feel of her mind and the thrum of a barely-there growl that she would not be convinced otherwise. That poor little wolf; it wasn't her fault someone had bred her to have such horrifying abilities. She'd probably just been doing what unattached wolves do...

Probably.

What would a wolf like that see in Tarvek especially? he couldn't help wondering, but the answers that came up were both paranoid and unpleasant --

Two heavy paws landed on his shoulders. A wolf nose pressed against the skin between his collar and his hair. Bangladesh was _before him_ \--

Gil bent under the weight and twisted into a twirling crouch so the wolf at his back came down heavy on all fours on the pavement and not on top of him. Then he was throwing himself in Bangladesh's path --

Bangladesh grumbled and bumped into his hip, head low and ears tilted back, but declined to lunge. Gil slipped a hand in the copper links of her collar anyway, just in case, heart thumping a bit.

The other wolf was a perfect stranger. A tall, rangy male, brown all over with no markings or paler undercoat, and Gil _would_ have remembered the pair of massive dewclaws on his front legs, barely smaller than Oggie's. They were borderline ticking on the stones as he walked.

His head was tilted in gleamy-eyed amusement, tongue lolling out. "Monsieur," Gil huffed, "that was _rude_."

The look in his eyes said it may have been rude, but it was also hilarious. Gil sighed, looked down at Bangladesh in confusion. _No biting?_

Bang shook herself out, turned away with a lazy flick of her tail, throwing of all things Jenka's scent name between them.

"He's... Jenka's?" Huh. Well, Gil had known there were more of Agatha's pack in town than the ones he'd met. "Hello."

The wolf politely offered his front paw, curved dewclaw twitching like an eagle thinking of clamping down. Gil shook anyway, accepted the name-scent of leather and yellowing paper, some kind of close, acidic smell like a rodent's nest, gave back his own acrid singed feathers and ozone. "Rodents nesting in a book, is that it? What do you have against literature, my good man?"

The wolf actually closed his eyes halfway and pretended to let his head fall in sudden sleepiness. Gil chuckled. Smart boy.

"Alright then, it's nice to meet you. Now, was there a reason you jumped me?"

 _Stalking prey,_ the wolf shared with this edge of careless amusement, with echoes of --

"Are you stalking _people_."

Lolling his tongue, the wolf dodged around Gil and trotted after Bang, who was waiting by the corner of the street. _Only one!_ it called back. _Small/wily/tender-meated-mmmm._

Gil spluttered. "Hey! -- Hey, this had better be a joke -- come back here!"

The dog-wolf reached Bang -- she turned her head to look at him consideringly and their eyes met for a long second, and then Gil was left racing after their tails, through another, bigger street and down a busy avenue. 

"Come on, I was going somewhere! Bang -- oh, whatever." 

He vaguely considered letting them go after whatever it was on their own and continuing toward Colette's, but -- hell. He was intrigued now, and also vaguely concerned that he would have to bribe them out of the city pound at the end of the day.

The feeling did not abate when at the next turn he found the dog-wolf loping away in the middle of the pavement, nose to the ground. Bangladesh was thankfully being more sensible for once and keeping to the sidewalk, but the great brown beast only set his speed to that of the carriages before and after him and kept pretending he was impervious to vehicles and horse hooves.

Gil was lucky that traffic was congested enough he could keep pace for now. He glanced at the carriage just behind the dog-wolf, trying to figure out if it would help or augment the chances of accident if Gil got out into the street too. It wasn't like the wolf was small or easy to miss, but Gil was taller, more likely to be seen -- but also less likely to dodge, too, more likely to scare drivers into hasty maneuvers--

"Is he on a quest?!"

Gil almost tripped. There were two children hanging halfway out of the window of the coach beside him, maybe ten or twelve years old all told, looking excited. "A what?"

"A quest! For his destined companion! Like how in the books--"

"Everyone knows! They know where their foretold companion is and they go to the end of the Earth to find them, right?! Ahh, Father, please follow the wolf--"

"That is so not how wolves work," Gil protested helplessly. "He's way more likely to be bonded already, he's an adult, there's no local pack in the city--"

"He's not, he's wearing no collar! This one's wearing a collar and I _bet_ he's bonded--"

"Well -- yes, she's mine, but wolves only wear collars if their brother, human brother I mean -- cares about fashion?" 

(... Or if, like Gil, they cared about being able to haul them bodily off a struggling poodle or annoying neighbor. But collaring your noble brother in soul wasn't actually well regarded in wolfbrother circles.)

"But the books _say_ they _don't_ until they _quest!_ " the girl shouted over the noise of clattering hooves.

"Wolves don't quest!" Gil shouted back.

 _Yes quest!_ the brown wolf threw back at him, nose still on the ground.

"And _you're_ a pest! Where are you even going anyway--"

Gil saw the courier on his bicycle emerge from the side-street ahead from the corner of his eye, saw the whole mess in slow motion -- the courier's face going from "oh, an opening in the traffic!" to horror -- knew he wouldn't brake in time.

Bangladesh leaped at the coach's horse even as Gil was leaping at the dog-wolf himself. His hands found a rough ruff; he landed astride on its shoulders, sort of sideways, shoving with his weight and the impact; the bicycle whizzing past probably shaved the end of his whiskers.

Gil landed heels first, immediately hauled the wolf up by the scruff between his legs to drag his rump out of the way of the carriage behind them. The wolf eeled free of his knees -- the coach passed them, children protesting noisily, and then _the damned beast kept going_.

Gil, of course, followed, swearing a blue streak in the confines of his head and heart hammering away. 

Across the street, into another avenue, then a back-alley, then--

Then the brown wolf and Bang braked with all four feet. Gil, going too fast not to pass them, caught hold of a rain pipe at the corner to yank himself to a stop, swung into the next alley on his momentum, and rolled back over his sister-wolf's shoulders, legs swinging fast to get himself out of sight. 

Then he asked himself if he had indeed seen a flash of peculiarly red hair.

The answer, of course, was _damnation, yes_.

_Which?_

_Little-knives_ , Bang replied carelessly.

... Huh. 

The wolves were crowding him against the wall, noses up in the air. Gil wondered why he was hiding from Lady Xerxsephnia. Apart from not wanting to get accosted about the, ahem, private proclivities of his sister-wolf, but it wasn't like he'd had even a fraction of a second to decide that. _Bang?_

_Quiet/hunting!_

Pff. Alright. 

He'd barely had the time to catch a glimpse in the corner of his eye; hopefully Xerxsephnia hadn't noticed him swinging out into the street like a marionette either... No one was calling out or making noises of amazement, at least.

The wolves sniffed at the pavement, at the edge of the building, waited a beat for the sound of a closing door to reach their ears, then padded out with their heads low and tails floating in line with their back. Gil followed, for lack of a better idea. 

The door led to a townhouse typical of the arrondissement -- fancier than his apartment building, with a lot of redundant fake-antiquity columns and tortured iron grilles on the lower windows.

"So she came in here? ... And then what? I mean, for all we know she's visiting a friend. Or she lives here, even."

Bangladesh snorted her disgruntlement, nose against the bottom of the door. Gil tried to burrow deeper into her senses, but even when he used her superior awareness his human brain didn't have the capacity to memorize the more complex, subtle tangles of individual humans. Just... probably women? Or more women than men, men tended to smell more--

He could hear the edge of Xerxsephnia's voice, coming from the side of the building. An open window, maybe...

The edge of another voice, too.

Gil was at the corner of the building in the next second, where a thin backstreet barely wide enough for a man's shoulders cut the city block in two. A gutter ran in the middle of it, leading filthy water and other, smellier things to the street's sewer grate.

There was a garden, and an open window.

"... glad you came to me, darling."

That _voice_. Agatha's, but. Not. An unctuous, poisonous version of her voice.

It was really easy to climb with the two walls so close to each other. Gil found a tree to hide his sudden appearance over the wall, ignored Bang's sudden offended protest -- where was _she_ meant to climb? -- and was pulling himself over the glass shards cemented into the top of the wall in about three seconds. He lowered himself slowly on the other side until the branch grew so bowed that he thought it would break, then dropped the last couple of feet into the flower beds.

Then once he had burgled his way in, he wondered, briefly, how he was going to justify being hereif he was caught.

 _"Was that truly necessary?"_ his father would ask, and Gil... Gil was pretty sure it was. Even as he ghosted through the bushes, he assessed his first instinctive reaction, his unthinking certainty that _he needed to know_.

Really, there were all the innocuous excuses in the world for Lucrezia to visit with Anevka, considering she was good enough friends with Anevka's father to have him host her, but _none_ for her to know Xerxsephnia. And even if Gil dismissed the thing about Xerxsephnia's brother that Agatha wouldn't talk about, the girl had to be _drowning_ in intrigues by mere virtue of being from Tarvek's family, and Agatha's mother herself...

"... understand how it is... overbearing _men_ , they must trample through everything with their big boots on..."

Huh. What the hell was Lucrezia laughing about now--

"Why, are you sure you haven't met my brother after all?" Xerxsephnia replied with an airy giggle. "Oh no, Seffie, don't you worry about this, it's too scary. Don't you worry about that, it's not like women already know about breeding and babies -- oh, my apologies, was that too forward?"

Lucrezia laughed deep in her throat, with honest amusement. "Hardly at all, dearie! Do be frank with me, there truly is no need to dull yourself."

"Thank you. That means a lot to me." A long beat of silence. "I... know he means well, but he acts like I'm still twelve years old, and I can already tell that until I'm married and some other man's problem he will always treat me such. I do love playing a good ingénue, but I wish I could hang it back up and actually have my opinions heard, you know?" 

"Darling! Darling, my poor sweet girl, there are _so_ many ways to make your opinions heard, and have everyone else think it's all their idea. Oh, but of course, sometimes you _do_ want the credit..."

... Was Xerxsephnia honestly here to get _tips_ on how to _manipulate better_? Gil made a face, and shuffled across the flower bushes so he could crouch with his shoulder to the wall, right under the windowsill.

When he asked it like a real and not rhetorical question, the answer was obvious. No, no she wasn't here for tips. There was no way Anevka's cousin would be as raw a beginner as she was making herself sound, not if the family had let her go out in Parisian society.

That was rather clever of her, as excuses went. 'I see you, because we're the same, so there's no need to pretend.' Of course they both still would, but it removed a layer of denial, pretended at possible alliances of sympathy.

He listened to them dancing verbally around each other for another five, ten minutes, keeping a vague mental ear on Bangladesh and the brown wolf out there. They'd circled the whole block and now Bang was harrying the poor mice-and-yellowed-books into making himself into a stepstool. 

_Bang, there's **glass**. _

One of the wolves snorted, and then Gil got pushed at him the body-sense of shaking your head hard to the side and up, opening your maw to send flying... Had they stolen a rag? Somebody's cloak? Gil choked a little. There it was on the wall. It looked like a cook's apron. _Okay, whose idea was that!_

 _His,_ Bang admitted shamelessly. _It's good, I'm keeping it._

She prodded at Gil for a visual check of the garden, and then she was up and over the wall, landing with the silent, unexpected grace of a jungle cat.

_Great, thanks, now we'll have to find a way to get you back out, and I couldn't have eavesdropped without you --_

The brown wolf landed in the hydrangeas.

"Now what was that noise?"

Two seconds later Gil was flattened side down against the wall under a vigorous rose bush as two beasts bigger than he was proceeded to disappear from sight entirely, and one of them was black and white with cow spots all over.

"Falling squirrel?" Xerxsephnia suggested dubiously. Lucrezia hummed, hands on the windowsill -- Gil could see blonde hair fluttering out in the breeze as she looked over the garden -- and then closed the window.

"It's getting cold out here, isn't it," he heard, faintly, as she walked away.

Damn it.

 _Great job_ , he sent the brown wolf as he started crawling along the wall.

 _Thank you!_ the wolf replied, when Gil knew damn well he knew the real meaning of Gil's words. Ugh, a wolf that knew sarcasm. 

And all he knew for sure was that Xerxsephnia was trying to ingratiate herself with Lucrezia Mongfish. Trying to get in on Lucrezia's schemes, or looking for support for hers? She'd appeared to be saying she was deliberately keeping her brother out of it, but who knew. Gil wasn't intending to discount out of hand a man who could make Agatha and Tarvek start to consider assassination as a reasonable way of dealing with him.

He found another corner of the garden to climb out of -- played stepladder for the wolves, first, bent in two and oomphing as they went bouncing up, then followed, landing in a casual crouch up the narrow little backstreet that ran between the houses. Then, walking down to rejoin the main street he casually yanked at the apron spread out on the glass shards on top; it tore, leaving shreds behind, but at least it should be less obvious what had happened. 

Trying half-heartedly to convince the brown wolf to go and give it back, he went down the street that smelled to Bang like Xerxsephnia and horse.

\--

"Lady Xerxsephnia."

Gil was aware he looked like a ruffian, the purest street urchin, and it had nothing to do with his serviceable but well-made clothes. It was all in the stance -- lurking at the mouth of a twisty little alley, slouching to the side with his spine like the tower of Pisa, hands deep in pockets, stretching the good lines of his pants; in his tone too, unimpressed, slightly foreboding. 

Also, there was the she-wolf at his side, grinning with wet fangs glistening in the shadow of the alley.

All that to say he wasn't surprised when her maidservant jumped up one foot in the air and immediately whirled on him, her closed umbrella brandished like a weapon.

He was a little more surprised with the young lady herself, come to a casual stop on the paved stones and arching one blood-red eyebrow, a faint smile lifting up a single corner of her mouth in what on a man he would have called a smirk.

"Monsieur Gilgamesh," she said, and now it definitely was a smirk. "Did you know you have a little..." She tapped at her bangs with a gloved finger. "...leaf in your hair."

\-- _damn_ it. Crap. Gil stopped in the middle of batting at his mess of hair, and frowned, chin jutting out briefly in frustration. Xerxsephnia chuckled. 

She was _way_ too free of guilt for someone who knew he'd caught her conspiring with... some random lady over... social issues such as how to be listened to more in public... _ugh_.

Well at least she hadn't called him Your Highness. 

"May I talk to you?" he asked, a little terse, because _God_ but this was not going to plan.

"Do you mean, somewhere out of the public eye?" She smiled, mouth closed but eyes glinting. "Shocking."

... Ugh. Gil stuffed both hands back in their respective pockets and threw the glaring maidservant and her ready umbrella a return frown. "... It can be right here, that's fine. Just. What do you know about Lucrezia Mongfish?"

"What do _you_ know?" Xerxsephnia returned, turning to face him more fully, her gloved hand rising to play casually with her hair. "I'm entirely open to an exchange of information, but I have not the faintest idea how the lady would have caught your notice." 

"Tit for tat?"

"Acceptable." Another smile, giving nothing away. "Please start, since you're asking."

Alright, how to lead into this properly... "You may know she's Agatha's mother--" 

A faint frown passed on Xerxsephnia's face. " _Right_. Yes."

Huh. "--And she hasn't talked to her in ages, missed several extremely significant family events, and now she suddenly wants to make friends again."

"Have you considered that she may simply be hurting for money?"

Gil gave her a deadpan look. "No. For the good reason that she seems the kind of person who's adept at finding rich admirers willing to fight each other to pay her way." There was no way she would have approached Agatha with such friendliness if Agatha had cut her off from her widow's pension. It would have been war, then.

He wasn't sure if he was imagining it, but Xerxsephnia's face seemed slightly colder now, more detached. What had he said, and more importantly, how to reel her in?

"... Also she's been kind of disturbingly flirty with both me and Tarvek, which, yuck."

Xerxsephnia's eyelids twitched, too reflexive to have been faked. "... Indeed." She sighed out, put a smile on her face. "What do you think is going on, then?"

"I notice a lot of tit for very little tat," Gil pointed out tartly. 

"Oh, _fine_." She flipped her hair, pouting oh so slightly. "She's been going around throwing out feelers for some plan that she refuses to expound upon, but so far everybody she approaches seems to have a lot of real estate in their back pocket. Your turn?"

Okay. The truth was, Gil had nothing else. Save for 'she's probably conspiring with someone who's probably a conspirer due to being related to Tarvek and Anevka.' As circumstantial evidence, this was so roundabout it fell straight off the map.

He opened his mouth, no sure what was going to come out. A blind thrust, hoping less to strike than to flush his target out of the dark... 

"How do wolves play into it?"

Xerxsephnia didn't react for a long, telling second; her maid did, hands clenching on her weapon. 

"... What on _Earth_ makes you think wolves play into it?"

Ah. Well, that... was interesting. Very unexpected. But at the same time...

"Honestly?" Gil said, gathering his thoughts. "Nothing from her side. Your brother's very involved, though, and it's interesting how you just casually brought him up to her. Like you wanted him in her mind."

... Also Herr Snarlantz had seemed pretty knowledgeable in wolf conformations, while Lucrezia herself professed not to care for them at all, and what exactly was she getting from letting the man hang to her coattails? 

Circumstantial, still.

Also the brown wolf had been stalking Xerxsephnia. Not Lucrezia.

 _Bond quest!_ Bang shared, layered with sarcasm. Gil swallowed a snort.

"That's _really_ far-fetched, Monsieur Wulfenbach."

"Well," he said jovially, now that he had her on the defensive, "the last conspiracy I saw you dabbling in was about those rare Valois lines your brother very specifically doesn't breed. That'll mark a man!"

"You know," Xerxsephnia snapped back, "a person can be in _several_ conspiracies at once. You really ought to see about widening your field of action."

It was kind of amusing to see one of _that_ bunch losing her poise, but he reminded himself she was Colette's good friend, and she'd been... she hadn't even _tried_ to be polished and demure with him, hadn't tried out the manipulation tricks she'd mentioned with Lucrezia. And just because she knew some things didn't mean she had caused them... Probably. 

Anyway if she shut him out he was going to lose a lot of intelligence. Gil smiled, offering his commiseration. "I should. Any advice on where to find myself a good tutor?"

She gave him the gimlet eye -- and then sagged, shoulders loosening, and let out a theatrical sigh. "Oh, _fine_. If you insist on getting involved in these things, I'll give you pointers."

\--What, really? 

His first thought was, is this a case of 'keep your enemies closer'? His second -- she _knew_ he distrusted her, could this still be a sincere offer of friendship even so? A friendship with caveats? Did her friendship with Colette have those, maybe? It ran counter to all Gil's instincts; either he liked and trusted someone or he didn't, but he knew some people... probably... could do otherwise, even if it made no sense to him emotionally speaking--

"But mostly because I don't want the Lady Bangladesh to be embarrassed by proxy."

Gil snorted out a startled laugh. "Oh, nothing embarrasses her, she has the moral constitution of a pirate patronizing a bar of ill repute -- um."

Xerxsephnia pinched her lips, but her smile still came through. "That was shocking," she sad, deadpan. "Wasn't it, Varpa. I am thoroughly scandalized."

The maid nodded with enthusiasm, still squinting suspiciously. 

Gil mock-glared back. "You asked me whether _Bang was a maiden wolf_. I'm the one who was scandalized!"

"Oh, pish. How long have you been in Paris again?" She let out another sigh, smiling. "You ought to call me Seffie, then. If I'm going to take you under my plotting wing."

Gil offered his hand, like he would have to another man -- a sincere gesture, and entirely calculated. "Do call me Gil, then." Seffie snorted, but shook. "I'll be entrusting my naive self to your shady care promptly."

Seffie gave him a long smirk. "Do call on me," she said with a nod to him and another to his sister wolf. "Varpa?"

Bowing, the maid produced a calling card out of her skirt pocket and offered it with both hands, her ruffian-smiting umbrella tucked reluctantly under one armpit. Gil took it, nodded his polite thanks.

"A good day to you, Gil Bangladeshbrother."

Gil watched her disappear around the corner of the street, waited a few beats, and then looked down at the brown wolf who'd spent the talk burrowed in the recessed mouth of a coal chute, hidden in shadows.

"She's gone," he told him. 

Seffie had taken control back of the conversation there at the end, and entirely dodged having to confirm anything out loud. But one: it kept her feeling well-disposed toward him, which was useful, and two, it was pretty much all the confirmation he needed.

There was a lot more she wasn't telling him about, of course, if she had let this much slip. But he could be patient.

"Well, what do you guys think?"

Bang huffed in amusement, sat on her haunches and started scratching her ear with her back paw. _Slippery sneaky snakes_ , she commented, but like she approved a bit. _But I can stalk her next!_

"Nah, everything she does goes through mouth noises, you'd never pay enough attention."

Bang grumbled and nipped his hand. The brown wolf crawled out and shook himself, sending coal dust flying everywhere, including a generous dusting onto Gil's once-pressed shirt and Bang's white spots.

"How about you, my good man. Find anything interesting?"

The dog-wolf blinked slowly in thought, staring at Gil, then lolled his tongue. _Yes_ , he said, satisfied, and then he trotted off without even attempting to sniff Bangladesh goodbye, which might have earned him a good bite. 

"Hey," Gil protested, vaguely nonplussed, and then gave up with a sigh. "Well, that leaves us."

Bang yawned and shared smells of rats and cats in the neighborhood that she was pondering hunting down. Gil groaned. 

She shoulder-checked him back into the alley. _Sit and think-too-much for a bit or else I'll have to (pull/drive/marionette) your body home_ , she ordered casually, and started walking off. _And you always bark my ears off when I have to do that. (Sad! It's funny.)_

Gil flushed. The last time she'd had to guide him that way, he'd been thinking through a theorem. He hadn't noticed he was handing her the week's worth of meat right out of the ice box until he absently bit into raw sausage for his breakfast. That wasn't as bad as the time she'd sleep-walked him out of a burning bed in his unmentionables. Gil really ought to stop having all-nighters, apparently. They made him way too suggestible. 

Anyway. 

Conjectures and a lot of pieces that might not even belong to the same puzzle. Forcing them together might mean he ended up with entirely erroneous conclusions. 

His father was extremely wary of Lucrezia Mongfish-Heterodyne. His father thought the secret wolf lines Martellus von Blitzengaard didn't have access to encroached on a bond. No proven relationship.

Xerxsephnia von Blitzengaard wanted to spy on Lucrezia Mongfish-Heterodyne, and was doing so by hinting at being at odds with her brother. Whether that was true or not.

Xerxsephnia von Blitzengaard thought Lucrezia Mongfish-Heterodyne was looking for real estate to use. Agatha had a lot of that. Lucrezia thought what was Agatha's was hers.

 _Little-knives thinks this is all the same thing,_ Bang said from where she was digging at a gutter choked with debris. 

"She might be wrong... Might not." 

The picture it all painted together was sparse, but stark, and mildly terrifying. But the provable worst Lucrezia had ever done in her life was not showing up to her son's funeral; the rest was all emotional neglect mixed with casual possessiveness. Accusing her of plotting around strange, unproven wolf lines was really far out of left field. 

Also it would hurt Agatha for nothing, bringing his random tidbits of suspicion to her. It would just make him look like a fool so desperate to get into her confidence that he thought nothing of making her unloving mother out to be some kind of political mind-rapist. He needed more proof. More hints. Just _more_.

At least the brown wolf _definitely_ had a brother also looking into this, who was going to know Gil was nosing around, but who probably wasn't already in on it or he wouldn't have needed to stalk the girl... A potential ally, or at least another source of intelligence. No way to find him again, though. Gil just had to hope they would run into the other wolf later.

... Or he was bonded to someone in the girl's immediate family and keeping an eye on her for safety, but Gil didn't think so. No Valois scion or affiliated would ever touch a cub so blindingly Heterodyne.

"Alright," he told his wolf. "Let's go home."

Bangladesh stood up, and then bit him. 

\--

(Scribbled on a bit of paper in Engineering class on Monday:)

_Van told me you were looking for me on Sunday, but you never did show up. What was it? -- A.H._

_I was very bored! But then I realized if you didn't hurt me for interrupting then Colette certainly would and thought better of it. - G.W._

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Mercy Lives Not in the Holly](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14988452) by [Asuka Kureru (Askerian)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru)




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